Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Years back, the director Mary Bronstein’s daughter, then just seven, fell extremely unwell. Bronstein took her to San Diego for care, with her husband staying back in New York. “We were forced to exist as mere roommates in this truly awful hotel,” Bronstein recounted. “There was nowhere at all to escape to. I felt very confined.” Every night, once her daughter had drifted off to sleep around eight, Bronstein would sequester herself in the lavatory with edibles and an inexpensive bottle of wine, grappling with what she now terms an existential quandary. It wasn’t just the anxiety and the sense of isolation—she also feared what awaited her beyond this period, once her daughter recovered and Bronstein was back to her pre-planned existence. “Who am I really? What defines me? What is my purpose?” she would repeatedly ask. This lasted for a period of eight months.
In time, her daughter’s health improved, and Bronstein transformed this occurrence into a script bearing the pointedly gloomy name “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Her initial full-length picture, the low-budget comedy “Yeast” (2008), featured Bronstein and Greta Gerwig portraying friends in their twenties embarking on a camping trip and crossing paths with a couple of men, portrayed by Josh and Benny Safdie. “If I Had Legs” explores a decidedly contrasting phase of life. The central character, Linda, works as a therapist in Long Island, battling a Job-esque series of calamities. Her daughter is underweight and needs a feeding tube. Her husband is away commanding a vessel. Water gushes through the ceiling, inundating her flat, leading her and the child to relocate to a dreary motel. She faces constant reprimands from a parking attendant at her daughter’s treatment center; a patient vanishes during a session, leaving Linda with an infant in tears. “Time is merely a progression of hurdles,” Linda expresses woefully. “Each objective is a precipice. There’s nothing at the conclusion, and then it arrives only for another cliff to appear.”
Bronstein penned the script without a particular actress in mind, just a blank canvas—yet she understood she wanted to capture that face in relentless closeup, to amplify the sensation of confinement. “I came to understand, nearing the conclusion of it, that I was essentially writing a sizable request that someone would need to honor,” Bronstein shared with me. “Who might this person be?” She had Australian actress Rose Byrne in her thoughts when she viewed the introductory episode of “Physical,” the Apple TV+ series where Byrne embodies a self-despising Reagan-era housewife with bulimia discovering agency through aerobics. In the initial scenes, we find her hiding in her bathroom amidst the remnants of a house gathering, gazing with distaste at her own captivating, languid features. “Look at yourself,” she internally criticizes. “Honestly. Do you really suppose you’re convincingly pulling off this whole charade? The disco-sex-kitten aesthetic, at your age?” Then she spots a blemish. Bronstein was convinced. “I simply knew instantly,” Bronstein told me. “It’s her. It simply couldn’t be anyone else.”
Once Byrne signed on for “If I Had Legs,” the pair regularly gathered at Bronstein’s residence in Chelsea, after they had taken their children to school. They dissected the screenplay line by line at the kitchen table, “then we revisited it, beginning once more from the start, pausing and having profound, personal discussions regarding motherhood, womanhood, and our respective childhoods,” Bronstein remembered. Byrne sought to understand Linda’s essence prior to this surge of misfortunes, before motherhood revolutionized her life. They settled on Linda having been rebellious and untamed in her early days; she hadn’t yet comprehended that motherhood would represent the most challenging experience she could subject her personality to.
At one juncture, Bronstein revealed to Byrne the diaries she had maintained during her daughter’s sickness, which she hadn’t even revealed to her partner or therapist. The hastily jotted accounts of dosages, calorie counts, and doctor visits offered insight into the character’s predicament. “Something about observing her handwriting and the actual written words simply broke my heart,” Byrne expressed to me recently. “I was immediately immersed in the level of anxiety Mary must have felt in such a situation—as would any parent. It translated strangely, stemming from these straightforward journals detailing the schedule. I completely understood.”
I encountered Byrne at a coffee shop in Carroll Gardens, situated near her residence with her longtime companion, actor Bobby Cannavale, and their two boys, Rocco and Rafa. Byrne, at age forty-six, donned a relaxed pin-striped oxford shirt over a blouse in earth tones, along with substantial Mr. Boho sunglasses, which she had lately misplaced and then stumbled upon in a jacket pocket. (“It’s similar to finding five dollars!”) She took them off, displaying eyes that gently descend at the outer corners, lending her face a drowsy quality, and placed an order for herbal tea.
Within “If I Had Legs,” distributed by A24 this weekend, Byrne’s translucent face is subjected to almost aggressive scrutiny—during the shoot, the camera often lingered so near that she could discern its whirring, capturing each pore and line. In one scene, we perceive her through a car’s rearview mirror, as her daughter’s irritable voice echoes from the backseat, and Byrne conveys her anguish with a recurrent twitch in her eye. Her hair seems limp, with a short undercut at the back—a somewhat dated two-thousands look that Byrne opted for to indicate that Linda was “stuck.”
The movie initially screened at Sundance in January, then at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Byrne was awarded the Silver Bear for Outstanding Lead Performance. If it’s garnering her early Oscar chatter, that’s not exclusively attributable to the beautiful-actress-deglammed element—such as Charlize Theron in “Monster”—it affirms Byrne’s remarkable scope and willingness to take risks. From her breakout period, circa the time that undercut was stylish, she has starred in horror (“Insidious”), historical epics (“Troy”), sci-fi (“Sunshine”), legal dramas (“Damages”), comic-book adaptations (the X-Men series), prestigious miniseries (“Mrs. America,” portraying Gloria Steinem), and a musical (“Annie”), and she’s morphed into a surprising cornerstone of comedies, including “Get Him to the Greek,” “Spy,” “Neighbors,” and “Bridesmaids,” where she embodies the impeccable counterpart to Kristen Wiig’s hot mess.
In the Apple TV+ sitcom “Platonic,” currently in its second installment, Byrne plays Sylvia, a stay-at-home mother rekindling a connection with an old hipster acquaintance, Will (Seth Rogen). The sequence chronicles Sylvia’s efforts to attain satisfaction beyond her semblance of domestic tranquility, be it by initiating her own event firm or becoming playfully inebriated with Will. Yet Byrne’s most amusing instances arise from observing Sylvia’s poise disintegrate under strain. During a recent episode, she bursts forth with annoyance at her partner (Luke Macfarlane), who has resigned from his legal career to pursue detective novel writing. “You know what?” she exclaims to him, in a restrained outburst. “Since you have the day off, perhaps you might drop the kids off at school, transport Simon to the orthodontist, and then, after pickup, take Frances to her SAT session, Simon to his bass lesson, and Maeve to Tae Kwon Do.” Nicholas Stoller, who co-created the series with his spouse, Francesca Delbanco, informed me, “It’s tragic, yet also somewhat humorous. I believe that a purely dramatic performer might render that speech depressing, while a strictly comedic one wouldn’t necessarily inspire belief. She simply portrays it very authentically.”
Considering “Platonic” in conjunction with “If I Had Legs,” one could suggest that Byrne has crafted a pair of portraits of overwhelmed mothers. “Platonic” falls into the Apatovian comedy realm, while “If I Had Legs” reimagines motherhood as a sort of horror film, where the dreaded figure isn’t a chainsaw-wielding murderer but, rather, the burdens of midlife. (The elevator pitch could be “ ‘Uncut Gems’ for Moms!”—which makes sense once you discover that Bronstein’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, co-authored the screenplay for “Uncut Gems” alongside the Safdie brothers, and he and Josh Safdie produced “If I Had Legs.”) Yet even my assertion that there existed a unifying theme prompted Byrne to pause. “People are quick to propose the most recent role you played, if they appreciated your portrayal, and you’re presented with countless stressed-out mother scenarios,” she clarified. “That is fairly monotonous. I would like to portray a composed C.E.O.!”
Byrne’s own mother, as she described her, brought up four offspring without ever appearing flustered. “She possessed the most steady disposition of utter serenity,” Byrne conveyed to me. This transpired in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney, where her mother served as an administrator at a primary school prioritizing Aboriginal children. Her father was a statistician partnering with the cinema chain Village Roadshow; Rose, the youngest among the children, aided him by surveying local shoppers concerning their movie habits. (Her father is also a fervent horse racing enthusiast who once won a superfecta, correctly predicting the precise order of the initial four finishers.)
Byrne began acting at age eight, at the Australian Theatre for Young People. At age twelve, she booked her inaugural film part, in “Dallas Doll” (1994), featuring Sandra Bernhard as a bisexual golf enthusiast seducing each member of an Australian family—except for the teen daughter, embodied by Byrne. Before long, Byrne was cast in the soap opera “Echo Point,” portraying a “naïve adolescent girl harboring a dubious past,” she recalled. The program dispatched her to malls to interact with admirers, transforming her into a teenybopper starlet. Her parents endorsed her acting pursuits (in a discreet, “very Australian fashion”), whilst maintaining her focus on her schooling. At age eighteen, she filmed “Two Hands,” an Australian crime comedy, alongside Heath Ledger. She depicted him as “a generous soul, with a trace of shyness behind his gaze.” Furthermore, she was affected by his feeling of actorly intention, which she did not possess. “I recollect him declining diverse soapy television shows and persisting,” she declared. “That is a difficult thing to achieve while very young.”
Byrne, conversely, was accepting whichever employment materialized. Even within Australia, the route to Hollywood was far from secret during the nineties, charted by individuals like Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Guy Pearce, and Toni Collette. After being rejected by drama institutes, Byrne registered at the University of Sydney, enrolling in courses in gender studies—reading Foucault instigated the notion that “gender constitutes a myth,” she shared—yet dropped out when offers continued to arise. In “Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones,” filmed in Australia, she portrayed Natalie Portman’s handmaiden, reciting such eloquent lines as “It is not I, milady. I hold anxieties regarding you.”
By 2004, she had received a pair of substantial ingenue roles in Hollywood productions: the romantic thriller “Wicker Park,” adjacent to Josh Hartnett, and the swords-and-sandals spectacle “Troy,” in which she embodied Briseis, a captive priestess gifted to Brad Pitt’s Achilles. Peter O’Toole, who portrayed King Priam, surprised her by noting her role was the finest in the film—and amused her with his subtle British humor. “I remember him ascending some stairs, while smoking and coughing,” Byrne recollected. “The A.D. was, like, ‘Peter, perhaps you might cease the smokes.’ And he retorted, ‘Perhaps I might cease the stairs.’ ” (Her impression was uncanny.)
By then, Byrne had grown more intentional regarding her acting—she dedicated a summer to studying with the Atlantic Theatre Company in Manhattan—but did not regard herself as amusing until she was cast in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), embodying the dilettantish Duchess of Polignac. Coppola invited her to improvise, and she discovered she had a talent for comedic invention. In one scene, adorned in feathers and extravagant clothing, she gossips with Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette in an opera box: “Look at the Marquis’s weight gain. I trust he will not shatter the seat!” “That instance marked my initial attempt to enter the realm of greater comedic aptitude,” Byrne expressed. “I am inclined to believe comedy is more challenging. We can generally concur regarding sadness, yet humor is subject to varying interpretations.”
Her comedic transition would be postponed, however. Following a tenure living in London, she relocated to New York to co-star with Glenn Close in “Damages,” the FX legal drama, which launched in 2007 and spanned five seasons. Byrne embodied a fresh yet intelligent junior associate drawn into Close’s machinations driven by ambition. Much like Elisabeth Moss in “Mad Men,” which debuted on cable during the same year, Byrne portrayed an acolyte evolving from uncertainty to dominance throughout the series’ run. Her performance bolstered her reputation as a dramatic talent and garnered her a pair of Emmy nominations.
Not until Stoller was recruiting for “Get Him to the Greek” (2010), featuring Russell Brand as the dissolute rocker Aldous Snow, did Byrne eventually unleash her innate comedian. She had consciously determined to pursue comedic roles, yet Stoller was puzzled when she auditioned for the role of Jackie Q, Aldous’s wild-child pop-star girlfriend. “I recognized Rose’s contributions from ‘Damages’ and ‘Sunshine,’ ” Stoller explained. “I noticed that she was planning to read, and my initial reaction was, Why is Rose Byrne auditioning for this? She’s considerably dramatic. She entered, and she utterly annihilated it. It ranks as one of the most amusing auditions I’ve ever witnessed.” (The audition record remains accessible online.) On set, Stoller recalled Byrne as an “improvisational powerhouse,” notably during her “flirtatious discussions with the since-discredited Russell Brand.”
Quickly enough, she was catching a tide of large-screen comedy during the 2010s, encompassing “Bridesmaids” (2011), which arguably boasted the finest all-female comedic ensemble since “All About Eve.” (She partnered with her co-star Melissa McCarthy again in “Spy,” playing a condescending antagonist.) In 2014, Stoller directed her anew, in “Neighbors,” which centered on a battle between a yuppie couple with a newborn and a neighboring fraternity house. Embodying Seth Rogen’s spouse might have relegated her to Katherine Heigl territory, but, Stoller recalled, “Her main note concerning that movie, and she was correct, was ‘I have no desire to be the nag.’ She conveyed, ‘As Seth’s wife, I wish to be his partner in mischief.’ ” During one unforgettable scene, her lactating breasts experience such engorgement that her husband is forced to manually relieve them—the kind of shocking humor typically reserved for penises and buttocks, rather than the glorified maternal figure. (Stoller asserted that Byrne was hesitant regarding the scene until he vouched that this had, in reality, transpired to the spouse of a screenwriter.)
Byrne’s rapport with Rogen was sufficiently powerful for Stoller to recruit them anew for “Platonic.” “She possesses an extraordinary aptitude for portraying subservience,” Stoller articulated. “She’ll exhibit low status, yet one can discern in her eyes that she desperately wishes to attain high status.” The press was delighted, and somewhat mystified, that such a genteel-seeming leading actress seemed to contain the spirit of Jonah Hill. Vanity Fair, in 2018, designated her a “Comic Superstar Flying Surprisingly Under the Radar,” expressing admiration that, after “Damages,” she had shunned the “obvious sphere: that of the dramatic performer regularly appearing in gloomy Oscar contenders and melancholic independent-house fare.”
If one were being harsh, one could brand “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” gloomy Oscar bait and melancholic independent-house fare. Yet, after a decade and a half of comedic roles, it feels akin to a counterintuitive venture for Byrne as opposed to a predictable one. Periodically, it descends into sheer despair. At one juncture, Linda is conferring with her therapist (portrayed, in a truly astounding moment of genre shock, by Conan O’Brien), who addresses her with aloof distance. “Simply advise me on what to do,” she pleads, sobbing and curling up on his chaise lounge. “I merely want someone to tell me what course to take.”
“When we captured that scene, it was profoundly moving,” Bronstein informed me. “Later, Rose drew near to me and expressed, ‘I sense I didn’t fully achieve that.’ I was incredulous. You undeniably did achieve it. I wouldn’t have advanced had you not. I comprehended that she didn’t suppose that she acted poorly—it was that she persisted in dwelling within the sentiment she had entered. She felt miserable as a person and was unable to dismiss it.”
Nevertheless, Byrne was equally receptive to the script’s undercurrent of intensely dark humor. During a moment of fragility, Linda yields to her daughter’s persistent demands for a pet hamster. On the journey homeward with the rodent, it claws against its container—Bronstein visualized Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”—and, amidst the pandemonium, Linda’s vehicle is rear-ended. She exits to confront the other driver, the hamster flees, and then . . . Let us declare that no hamsters suffered harm throughout the execution of this film.
Byrne, whose offspring with Cannavale are now seven and nine, didn’t need to search extensively to analyze the escalating chaos of parenthood. “My residence is considerably noisy,” she confided in me. “Loud music, booming exchanges. When I am afforded tranquility, I abstain from listening to or viewing anything. I simply relish the solitude. The volume is forever amplified in my residence, and I endeavor to lower it.” When I mentioned the hamster subplot within “If I Had Legs,” Byrne stated, “I deeply relate to that, being a parent. Heavens, the traps one falls into! And one feels remarkably like a failure, because one thinks, Why is my child unable to manage without X, Y, or Z? It is not their fault. It stems from my inadequacy in equipping them with sufficient resilience or capability. And one is instantly assailed by guilt, and it is relentless.”
Rafa, one of Byrne’s children, intensely desires a pet chameleon, yet thus far, she has stood firm. Instead, he has been eliciting his mother’s improvisational abilities. “He is constantly asking, ‘Hey, Mom, what if we strolled outside and there rested a chameleon upon the thoroughfare, necessitating that you gather it, and bestow it to me? What would you execute? Embody it! Embody it!’ ” Seated across from me, she mimed her role: discerning the fictitious chameleon, collecting it, conveying it home. Curious that her son would desire a chameleon when he already possesses one. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
