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Years back, the director Mary Bronstein’s daughter, then a young girl of seven, fell seriously unwell. Bronstein took her to San Diego for therapy, leaving her spouse in New York. “We were forced to live like strangers in this truly awful hotel,” Bronstein remembered. “There was nowhere to escape. I felt extremely confined.” Each night, after her daughter was asleep by eight, Bronstein would hide in the restroom with sustenance and a cheap bottle of vino, grappling with what she now refers to as an existential crisis. It wasn’t solely the strain and the solitude—she also feared what awaited her afterwards, once her daughter recovered and Bronstein went back to her formerly planned existence. “Who am I? What am I? What am I up to?” she would ponder. She remained there for eight months.
In time, her daughter improved, and Bronstein transformed the ordeal into a script with the bitingly pessimistic name “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Her debut feature, the mumblecore comedy “Yeast” (2008), featured Bronstein and Greta Gerwig as friends in their twenties who embark on a camping excursion and encounter two guys played by Josh and Benny Safdie. “If I Had Legs” concerns a notably different phase of life. The central figure, Linda, is a therapist in Long Island enduring a Job-esque series of misfortunes. Her daughter is underweight and requires a feeding tube. Her husband is away captaining a vessel. Water gushes through her ceiling and inundates her apartment, prompting her and the child to relocate to a drab motel. She faces constant rebukes from a parking employee at her daughter’s treatment center; one of her patients vanishes during a session, leaving Linda with a weeping infant. “Time is a string of obstacles,” Linda bemoans. “Each objective is a precipice. There’s nothing at the finish, but then it arrives, and there’s simply another drop.”
Bronstein penned the screenplay without a particular actress envisioned, just a generic face—but she realized that she’d like to capture that face in unrelenting close-up, to amplify the sensation of confinement. “I came to the realization, as I neared the conclusion, Wow, I’m writing a rather significant check that somebody will have to deposit,” Bronstein revealed to me. “Who will that individual be?” She was contemplating the Australian performer Rose Byrne when she viewed the pilot of “Physical,” the Apple TV+ program where Byrne portrays a self-despising Reagan-era homemaker battling bulimia who attains empowerment through aerobics. Early on, we observe her sheltering in her bathroom during the final moments of a house party, gazing with revulsion at her own attractive, unhurried face. “Take a look at yourself,” she mutters, in a voice-over. “I mean, really. Do you genuinely believe you’re pulling this entire thing off? The disco-sex-kitten appearance, at your age?” Then she spots a blemish. Bronstein was convinced. “I simply knew,” Bronstein disclosed to me. “It’s her. And it cannot be anyone else.”
Once Byrne agreed to be in “If I Had Legs,” the two women would convene frequently at Bronstein’s residence, in Chelsea, after escorting their children to school. They would examine the script page by page at the dining table, “then we’d go back again, start over, pausing and engaging in profound, intimate discussions about motherhood, about womanhood, about our formative years,” Bronstein recollected. Byrne sought to understand Linda’s essence prior to this onslaught of predicaments, before motherhood disrupted her existence. They concluded that Linda had been rebellious and untamed in her youth; she hadn’t yet understood that motherhood would present the most demanding challenge she could potentially inflict upon her temperament.
At a certain juncture, Bronstein presented Byrne with the diaries she had maintained during her daughter’s ailment, which she hadn’t even revealed to her partner or her counselor. The scribbled record-keeping of dosages, calories, and doctor’s appointments unlocked the character’s suffering. “Something about observing her handwriting and the written words truly broke my heart,” Byrne mentioned to me recently. “It instantly plunged me into the degree of worry Mary would have experienced in that circumstance—as would any parent. It strangely conveyed the feeling, solely from these basic diaries detailing the timetable. I understood completely.”
I encountered Byrne at a coffee shop in Carroll Gardens, near her abode with her longtime partner, the actor Bobby Cannavale, and their two boys, Rocco and Rafa. Byrne, who is forty-six, donned a loose pin-striped Oxford shirt over an earth-toned blouse, coupled with bulky Mr. Boho sunglasses, which she had lately misplaced and then rediscovered in a jacket pocket. (“It’s akin to discovering five dollars!”) She took them off, exposing eyes that descend slightly at the outer corners, granting her face a drowsy quality, and ordered an herbal tea.
In “If I Had Legs,” launched by A24 this weekend, Byrne’s clear face is subjected to nearly aggressive scrutiny—during filming, the camera frequently lingered so near that she could perceive its whirring, capturing every pore and line. In one scene, we observe her through the rearview mirror of a car, as her daughter’s complaining voice emerges from the back seat, and Byrne conveys her distress with a recurrent twitch of the eye. Her hair is unkempt, with an undercut in the rear—an outdated two-thousands look that Byrne selected to indicate that Linda was “stuck.”
The film was unveiled at Sundance, in January, and subsequently screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Byrne received the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. If it’s generating early Oscar hype for her, that’s not solely due to the beautiful-actress-deglammed aspect—see: Charlize Theron in “Monster”—it’s a validation of Byrne’s extraordinary versatility and daring. Since her breakthrough, around the period when that undercut was fashionable, she’s participated in horror (“Insidious”), historical epic (“Troy”), science fiction (“Sunshine”), legal drama (“Damages”), comic-book material (the X-Men franchise), prestigious miniseries (“Mrs. America,” as Gloria Steinem), and a musical (“Annie”), and she’s evolved into a notable figure in comedies, including “Get Him to the Greek,” “Spy,” “Neighbors,” and “Bridesmaids,” where she portrays the pristine contrast to Kristen Wiig’s basket case.
In the Apple TV+ sitcom “Platonic,” presently in its second season, Byrne embodies Sylvia, a stay-at-home mother who re-establishes contact with an old hipster acquaintance, Will (Seth Rogen). The series monitors Sylvia’s endeavors to locate contentment beyond her facade of domestic fulfillment, whether by launching her own event enterprise or becoming humorously drunk with Will. However, Byrne’s most amusing moments stem from witnessing Sylvia’s composure crumble under duress. In a recent installment, she erupts with discontent at her husband (Luke Macfarlane), who has abandoned his position as a lawyer to pursue detective novels. “You know what?” she informs him, in a tight-lipped outburst. “Considering you’re free today, perhaps you could drop the children off at school and you could escort Simon to the orthodontist, and then, after pickup, maybe you could take Frances to her SAT class, Simon to his bass lesson, and Maeve to Tae Kwon Do.” Nicholas Stoller, who co-created the program with his spouse, Francesca Delbanco, informed me, “It’s sad, yet it’s also somewhat funny. I believe, for a purely dramatic actress, that speech could be a letdown, but with a purely comedic actress you wouldn’t necessarily find it convincing. She simply portrays it very authentically.”
Between “Platonic” and “If I Had Legs,” one could assert that Byrne has crafted a diptych of overwhelmed mothers. “Platonic” is Apatovian humor, whereas “If I Had Legs” envisions motherhood as a sort of horror film, where the villain isn’t a killer wielding a chainsaw but, instead, the burdens of middle adulthood. (Its summary could be “‘Uncut Gems’ for Moms!”—which makes sense once you realize that Bronstein’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, co-wrote the script for “Uncut Gems” with the Safdie brothers, and that he and Josh Safdie are producers of “If I Had Legs.”) However, even my notion that there existed a thematic connection gave Byrne cause for reflection. “People will quickly offer you a comparable role to the last thing you did, if they appreciate how you executed it, and you’re offered every stressed-out mother imaginable,” she remarked. “That’s rather tedious. I’d be interested in portraying a composed C.E.O.!”
Byrne’s own mother, by her account, reared four children without exhibiting any indication of strain. “She had the most even-tempered disposition of complete calm,” Byrne mentioned to me. This transpired in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney, where her mother served as an administrator at an elementary institution that prioritized Aboriginal children. Her father was a statistician affiliated with the cinema chain Village Roadshow; Rose, the youngest offspring, would assist him by polling local shoppers regarding their movie-watching preferences. (Her father is also a dedicated horse bettor who once secured a superfecta, which involves correctly predicting the sequence of the initial four finishers.)
Byrne was eight when she commenced acting, at the Australian Theatre for Young People. At twelve, she secured her initial cinematic role, in “Dallas Doll” (1994), co-starring Sandra Bernhard as a bisexual golf professional who charms each member of an Australian family—except for the teen daughter, portrayed by Byrne. Shortly afterward, Byrne landed a part on the soap opera “Echo Point,” as a “naïve teen-ager with a dubious past,” she recalled. The program dispatched her to malls to engage with fans, transforming her into a teenybopper celebrity. Her parents fostered her acting ambitions (in a subtle, “typically Australian fashion”), while ensuring she remained focussed on her education. At eighteen, she filmed “Two Hands,” an Aussie crime comedy, alongside Heath Ledger. She characterized him as “a giving individual, somewhat reserved beneath the surface.” Moreover, she was impressed by his feeling of artistic drive, which she lacked. “I recall him declining various simplistic TV shows and persevering,” she stated. “That’s a challenging feat when one is exceptionally young.”
Byrne, conversely, accepted any roles that presented themselves. Even in Australia, the route to Hollywood was hardly veiled in the nineties, paved by figures such as Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Guy Pearce, and Toni Collette. After being rejected by drama institutions, Byrne enrolled at the University of Sydney, where she attended classes in gender studies—reading Foucault introduced the notion that “gender is a construct,” she elucidated—but dropped out when the opportunities continued to arise. In “Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones,” filmed in Australia, she portrayed Natalie Portman’s handmaiden, delivering such eloquent lines as “It’s not me, milady. I’m concerned for you.”
By 2004, she had secured a pair of substantial ingénue roles in Hollywood productions: the romantic thriller “Wicker Park,” alongside Josh Hartnett, and the swords-and-sandals spectacle “Troy,” where she played Briseis, a captured priestess offered to Brad Pitt’s Achilles. Peter O’Toole, who portrayed King Priam, astonished her by commenting that hers was the most compelling character in the film—and amused her with his understated British humor. “I recall him ascending some stairs, and he was smoking and coughing,” Byrne recounted. “The A.D. was, like, ‘Peter, perhaps you should quit smoking.’ And he responded, ‘Perhaps I should cease climbing stairs.'” (Her impersonation was spot-on.)
By then, Byrne had become more thoughtful about her acting—she dedicated a summer to studying with the Atlantic Theatre Company, in Manhattan—but didn’t perceive herself as humorous until she was cast in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), as the frivolous Duchess of Polignac. Coppola encouraged her to improvise, and she discovered that she possessed a talent for comedic creation. In one scene, adorned in feathers and finery, she gossips with Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette in an opera box: “Observe how overweight the Marquis has become. I hope he doesn’t shatter the chair!” “That’s when I commenced opening the door to being capable of more comedy,” Byrne commented. “I feel that comedy is more demanding. We can all collectively acknowledge when something is somber, but when something is amusing, it’s a considerably more subjective matter.”
Her comedic transition would need to be deferred, however. Following a period residing in London, she relocated to New York to co-star with Glenn Close in “Damages,” the FX legal drama, which premiered in 2007 and continued for five seasons. Byrne portrayed a fresh-faced but astute junior associate drawn into Close’s power-hungry schemes. Like Elisabeth Moss in “Mad Men,” which debuted on cable the same year, Byrne played a follower who evolved from timid to assertive over the course of the show’s duration. Her performance strengthened her standing as a dramatic force and garnered her two Emmy nominations.
It wasn’t until Stoller was casting “Get Him to the Greek” (2010), starring Russell Brand as the dissolute rocker Aldous Snow, that Byrne finally had the chance to unleash her inner comedian. She had made a conscious decision to pursue comedic roles, but Stoller was puzzled when she auditioned for the role of Jackie Q, Aldous’s wild-child pop-star girlfriend. “I recognized Rose’s work from ‘Damages’ and ‘Sunshine’,” Stoller elucidated. “I observed that she was scheduled to come in to read, and my initial thought was, Why is Rose Byrne auditioning for this? She’s so dramatic. Then she entered, and she simply excelled. It was among the most hilarious auditions I’ve ever seen.” (The audition tape is available online.) On set, Stoller remarked, Byrne was an “improvisational marvel,” particularly during her “flirtatious exchanges with the since disgraced Russell Brand.”
Soon enough, she was navigating a wave of twenty-tens big-screen comedy, including “Bridesmaids” (2011), which may have presented the finest female comedic ensemble since “All About Eve.” (She reunited with her co-star Melissa McCarthy in “Spy,” playing a haughty villainess.) In 2014, Stoller directed her once more, in “Neighbors,” concerning a conflict between a yuppie pair with an infant and a fraternity house adjacent. Portraying Seth Rogen’s spouse might have placed her in Katherine Heigl territory, but, Stoller recalled, “Her main request on that film, which was accurate, was ‘I don’t want to be the nag.’ She said, ‘If I’m wed to Seth, I’m his accomplice.'” In one unforgettable scene, her lactating breasts become so engorged that her husband is obliged to milk her—a type of crude bodily humor typically reserved for male anatomy, not the revered maternal form. (Stoller indicated that Byrne was uncertain about the scene, until he confirmed that this had indeed happened to the wife of one of the screenwriters.)
Byrne’s rapport with Rogen was so effective that Stoller reassembled them for “Platonic.” “She has a remarkable capacity to portray a subordinate position,” Stoller clarified. “She’ll play low status, but one can perceive in her eyes that she desperately desires to be high status.” The press was delighted, and somewhat perplexed, that such an elegant-appearing leading lady appeared to possess the spirit of Jonah Hill. Vanity Fair, in 2018, labeled her a “Comic Superstar Flying Surprisingly Under the Radar,” impressed that, after “Damages,” she had circumvented the “conventional echelon: that of the dramatic actress who regularly features in somber Oscar fodder and melancholic indie-house productions.”
If one is feeling unkind, one might categorize “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” as somber Oscar fodder and melancholic indie-house fare. However, following a decade and a half of comedic roles, it seems more of an unexpected decision for Byrne than an inevitable one. At times, it descends into utter despair. At one point, Linda is conferring with her own therapist (played, in a genuinely shocking bit of genre variance, by Conan O’Brien), who treats her with frigid reserve. “Just inform me what to do,” she implores, weeping and curling up on his couch. “I simply desire someone to tell me what to do.”
“When we filmed that scene, it was incredibly emotionally intense,” Bronstein informed me. “Subsequently, Rose approached me and stated, like, ‘You realize, I feel that I didn’t quite get that.’ I responded, ‘Are you joking? You did achieve it. I would never proceed if you hadn’t.’ What I discerned was that it wasn’t that she believed that she didn’t excel at acting—it’s that she remained immersed in the feeling she had entered. She was feeling distressed as a person and was unable to dispel it.”
However, Byrne was also receptive to the script’s hidden current of pitch-black humor. In a moment of frailty, Linda succumbs to her daughter’s persistent demands for a pet hamster. On the drive home with the rodent, it scratches at its container—Bronstein imagined Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”—and, amidst all the commotion, Linda’s vehicle is rear-ended. She exits to confront the other driver, the hamster escapes, and then . . . let’s simply state that no hamsters were injured during the production of this film.
Byrne, whose sons with Cannavale are now seven and nine, didn’t need to search extensively to investigate the compounding turmoil of parenthood. “My residence is exceedingly noisy,” she told me. “Loud music, loud conversations. When I can achieve quiet, I refrain from listening to or watching anything. I simply cherish the solitude. Everyone is perpetually increasing the volume in my residence, and I’m attempting to decrease it.” When I broached the hamster subplot in “If I Had Legs,” Byrne stated, “I resonate with that profoundly, being a parent. Oh, my goodness, the errors you commit! And you feel like a total disappointment, because you’re thinking, Why can’t my child manage without X, Y, or Z? That’s not their failing. That’s my failing that they’re not sufficiently resilient or not adequately capable. And you immediately feel guilty, and it’s unending.”
Rafa, one of Byrne’s sons, desperately desires a pet chameleon, but thus far she has remained steadfast. Instead, he’s been summoning his mother’s improvisational abilities. “He’s constantly inquiring of me, ‘Hey, Mom, what if we ventured outside and there was a chameleon on the street, and you were required to pick it up, and you had to give it to me? What would you do? Enact it! Enact it!'” Seated across from me, she mimed her role: spotting the imaginary chameleon, picking it up, bringing it home. It’s strange that her son wants a chameleon when he already has one. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
