Move over, Uncut Gems: there’s a hot new contender for the title of most stressful movie ever made.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens in a state of permanent anxiety. Beeps pierce the soundtrack. The camera crowds its central character. Mary Bronstein’s film drops the audience not at the precipice of a breakdown but slap bang in the middle of a panic attack, subjecting viewers to the same sensory overload as its protagonist, played with queasy precision by Rose Byrne.
The movie kept this writer awake for two nights. No wonder the experience lingers for the woman at the centre of its maelstrom.
“The film is still unravelling for me,” Byrne says. “That’s kind of never happened to me before. That’s why it’s so great to see it with an audience. I keep learning new things about it.”
It’s a remarkable second feature from Bronstein, the director of the critically acclaimed Yeast, a grungy comedy from 2008 featuring a young Greta Gerwig. (Bronstein is also half of this year’s coolest Oscar couple: her husband, Ron Bronstein, is one of the writers of the Academy Award-nominated Marty Supreme.)
Byrne is a fan.
“The screenplay was incendiary,” the Australian powerhouse says of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. “The film really defies genre. It is extraordinary what you see on the screen: beautiful, with Lynchian ideas, the existential themes she’s toying with, the horror tropes, and the comedy set pieces. The hamster in the film is described like Jack Nicholson from The Shining banging through the wall. It has purely dramatic sequences and comedy set pieces. It was a script of reveals.”
Byrne’s Oscar-nominated turn justifiably makes her Jessie Buckley’s nearest rival in the best-actress category. Both stars took home awards from the Golden Globes, Buckley for best actress in a drama, Byrne for best actress in a musical or comedy. One got a slight sense that the critics had forgotten how good Byrne could be.
She has always had the aura of a proper movie star, but perhaps not everyone appreciated the full measure of her acting chops. She walked away from Berlin International Film Festival with the Silver Bear for best leading performance. Previous winners include Gena Rowlands, for Opening Night, and, jointly, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, for The Hours.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Rose Byrne in Mary Bronstein’s film
“I was so emotional about winning the Silver Bear,” Byrne says. “I honestly couldn’t believe it. I’m not very well versed in that world – it’s not really my wheelhouse – so I felt very speechless when it happened.”
In fact, Byrne has form. A full 25 years ago she won the Volpi Cup for best actress at Venice International Film Festival, for her role in Clara Law’s Aussie drama The Goddess of 1967. She has been playing the long game.
Unsurprisingly, Byrne was marked down as a very early contender for the best-actress Oscar. She edged out Buckley at the New York Film Critics Circle, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, delivering funny, unpretentious speeches all the way.
At the Golden Globes she was down to earth in characteristically Australian fashion. “Thanks to my mum and dad, who bought Paramount+ so they could watch the Golden Globes from Sydney,” she said. “And I’d like to thank my husband, Bobby Cannavale, who couldn’t be here because we are getting a bearded dragon, and he went to a reptile expo in New Jersey.”
She certainly deserves a dragon. She exercises every acting muscle as Linda, a therapist and mother who is barely holding her life together. The intersection between existential dread and frantic school runs has never been so carefully articulated.
“Mary has been saying to audiences, sometimes beforehand, ‘Think about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in your life, like your worst trauma,’” Byrne says of Bronstein. “And then think about the worst thing that’s happened to you today. That could be you stubbing your toe or spilling your coffee. That’s where this movie exists. It’s the school run and work and all of that.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Conan O’Brien and Rose Byrne in Mary Bronstein’s film
Shot in just under a month, the production demanded constant emotional escalation. That pressure compelled an impeccable ensemble cast – including ASAP Rocky, Christian Slater and a revelatory Conan O’Brien – to connect with method-acting energies.
“My adrenaline was so high doing the film,” Byrne says. “It was very quick and it was a high-wire act, just finding the comedy, finding the nuance, finding the horror. Both horror and comedy are all about timing. I was constantly working with Mary to make sure the character wasn’t one note – or just hysterical – because she starts deep, deep, deep in the crisis.”
The character’s unspooling had to remain intelligible even as it intensified. That can make for a white-knuckle experience. Linda’s daughter’s name is never revealed, and her face isn’t shown until the final scene. The ceiling of the family’s home collapses, leaving a gushing and mysterious hole that necessitates relocation to a hotel, where Linda becomes increasingly dependent on wine. There’s even a runaway hamster.
Drawing on her own home life helped. She and Cannavale have been together since 2012 – she calls him her husband, but “we just haven’t gone to the courthouse yet”, she told the Washington Post a few months ago – and Byrne has been juggling acting with motherhood since 2016.
“The movie is the character,” she says. “I’m pretty grounded. I have two small kids, and they’re very grounding. Taking care of them after a long day helps. But it was disorienting, to say the least, when we finished this movie. It was weirdly shocking. Like a car crash.”
Rose Byrne in Savannah, Georgia. Photograph: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Few actors could pull off the demands of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. But few actors could match Byrne’s effortless swerves from Hollywood franchises – Peter Rabbit, Star Wars: Insidious – to the forensic legal thrills of the TV series Damages and, on stage, the heavy lifting of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Euripides’ Medea.
Fewer still combine the top acting prizes at both the Berlin and Venice film festivals with the MTV Movie Award for WTF moment.
Born and raised in Sydney, Byrne landed her first professional roles in her teens.
“I fell into it at a really young age, doing classes, and just really loved it,” she says. “And I wasn’t sure how to do it as a job. Even when that happened, I definitely went through a period of, Did I just want to do this because I started when I was young, or do I want to do this because I love it?”
She is convincing as an American. Just watch her bumbling with Seth Rogen in the hit Apple TV comedy Platonic, but her sense of national identity remains unshakeable.
“Being Australian is a huge part of my identity,” Byrne says.
Platonic: Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen
Breakthrough came with a stirring turn opposite Brad Pitt in Wolfgang Petersen’s epic Troy, from 2004. She arrived as part of the same Aussie wave that brought Kidman, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett to Hollywood. Margot Robbie and Chris Hemsworth followed in her wake.
“When I started there was much more of a stepladder process. You usually worked in Australia first, tried to establish yourself, and then hoped to move internationally,” she says. “Now people finish school and head straight to LA or London or wherever they’re trying to work.
“I love discovering new Australian talent, and, of course, I love my countrymen. There’s always a sense of intimacy with Australians, because it’s such a small population, and an even smaller acting community. I definitely benefit from that.”
That sense of belonging extends to Ireland. “I have such an Irish name in Ireland,” she says. “When I go through passport control they say, ‘Welcome home.’ And, even better, I’ve never had to spell my name there. That alone is such a joy.”
Byrne’s early American career was shaped by drama, particularly Damages, which established her in the United States as a formidable screen presence. She has a special reverence for Glenn Close, her costar on that show.
“She was just such a diligent performer and so obsessed with the material and the character,” Byrne says. “You don’t see the homework, but you feel the lived-in nature of her performances.”
I was so lucky. Among my early mentors was Paul Feig, who just reveres women in comedy,
— Rose Byrne
She found a wider audience and a particular knack for comedies under the tutelage of the director Paul Feig and the producer Judd Apatow. No one has worn a wig to more hysterical effect than Byrne channelling every Bond villain opposite Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham in Spy, from 2015.
“I’m not a natural comedian, but I try,” she says. “I’d longed to do comedy for a while. I’d always been limited to being seen as a serious actor. The imaginative quality you have as a child, derived from joy and humour, doing comedy later returned me to that place. When the stakes are high it’s such a great stage for something funny.”
Bridesmaids: Rose Byrne with Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Kristen Wiig and Ellie Kemper in Paul Feig’s 2011 film. Photograph: Suzanne Hanover/Universal
The raucous hen-party romp Bridesmaids, a colossal hit in 2011, opened the door to a run of studio comedies – Get Him to the Greek, Bad Neighbours, Spy – that, helped by Byrne’s sharp presence, came to define a particular era of Hollywood film-making. They are, alas, the sort of pictures Hollywood doesn’t make any more.
“That space for the mid-range-budget comedy, with an ensemble, is gone,” she says. “That was our thing. And it breaks my heart. The audience for those films is obvious. Women love going to those movies – and always have. That’s a huge audience to be missing out on financially. I’m still hoping that comedy can make a comeback.”
Those productions offered, aside from fine entertainment, a great space for female performers to stretch out and hone their talents.
“I was so lucky. Among my early mentors was Paul Feig, who just reveres women in comedy,” she says. “And I got to do Bridesmaids with him, and Spy. To be in creative conversations with the great Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy? I can’t believe I got to be in that group of women.”
As studio comedy has receded, Byrne’s career has shifted towards prestige television and longer-form storytelling. She’s compelling as a 1980s housewife finding herself through aerobics across three seasons of Physical (which she also produced), another Apple TV show. She’s the best thing in Platonic. She’s unflappable and complex as the groundbreaking feminist Gloria Steinem in the miniseries Mrs America.
“I would love to have a pint with Gloria Steinem,” Byrne says. “Not my version, but the real thing.”
She will soon return to a courtroom for The Good Daughter, a TV adaptation of the bestselling Karin Slaughter novel. In March she’ll segue from a busy awards season to the Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s play Fallen Angels.
“Acting has to be intuitive,” Byrne says. “When it becomes too cerebral, then it doesn’t work. No matter what the role, it’s all about the feelings.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in cinemas from Friday, February 20th