Rose Byrne Hits the Mother Lode

However, her comedic turn will have to wait. After living in London for a while, she moved to New York to star opposite Glenn Close in Damages, an FX legal drama that debuted in 2007 and ran for five seasons. Byrne played a hot-tempered but sharp-witted junior assistant caught up in Close's power-hungry machinations. Like Elisabeth Moss in Mad Men, which aired on cable that same year, Byrne played a servant who goes from shy to dominant throughout the entire show. Her performance cemented her reputation as a dramatic force and earned her two Emmy Award nominations.

It wasn't until Stoller starred in Take Him to the Greek (2010), starring Russell Brand as rocker Aldous Snow, that Byrne was finally able to unleash her inner jester. She made a conscious decision to pursue comedic roles, but Stoller was taken aback when she auditioned for the role of Jackie Q, the pop star friend of Aldous's wild child. “I knew Rose’s work from Damages and Sunshine,” Stoller explained. “I saw she was coming to read and my first thought was, 'Why is Rose Byrne reading this? She's so dramatic. Then she came and just destroyed it. It was simply one of the funniest auditions I've ever seen.” (The audition has been saved. online.) On set, according to Stoller, Byrne was an “improv machine”, especially during her “flirtatious conversations with the already fallen and disreputable Russell Brand.”

Soon she was riding the wave of twenty-ten comedies on the big screen, including Bridesmaids (2011), which arguably had the best female comedy ensemble since All About Eve. (She reunited with her co-star Melissa McCarthy in Spy, playing the haughty villainess.) In 2014, Stoller cast her again in Neighbors, about a war between a yuppie couple with a child and the hostel next door. Playing Seth Rogen's wife might have taken her into Katherine Heigl territory, but as Stoller recalls, “Her main point in the movie, and it was right, was, 'I don't want to be nagging.' She said, “If I marry Seth, I will become his partner in crime.” “In one indelible sceneher lactating breasts become so swollen that her husband is forced to milk her—the kind of crude bodily humor usually reserved for dicks and asses rather than the holy mother form. (Stoller said Byrne acted uncertain at the scene until he assured her that it had actually happened to the wife of one of the writers.)

Byrne's chemistry with Rogen was so good that Stoller brought them back together for Platonik. “She has an amazing ability to play beta,” Stoller explained. “She will play with low status, but you can see in her eyes that she desperately wants to have high status.” The press were delighted and a little perplexed that such a noble-looking leading lady seemed to have the soul of Jonah Hill. Vanity Fairin 2018, called She was impressed, as “a comic book superstar suddenly flying under the radar,” that after Damages she had leapfrogged “an obvious echelon: that of the dramatic actress who regularly appears in dark Oscar bait and moody indie house fare.”

If you're feeling ungenerous, you might call If I Had Legs I'd Kick You dark Oscar bait and moody indie house fare. But after a decade and a half of comedy roles, it seems more counterintuitive than inevitable for Byrne. At times he falls into extreme despair. At one point, Linda talks to her therapist (played in a truly amazing genre shock by Conan O'Brien), who treats her with cold reserve. “Just tell me what to do,” she begs, sobbing and curled up on his couch. “I just want someone to tell me what to do.”

“When we shot that scene, it was very emotionally deep,” Bronstein told me. “Rose came up to me later and said, 'You know, I feel like I didn't handle this.' I was like, “Are you crazy?” You did nail it. I would never have moved on if you hadn't. I realized that it wasn't that she thought she was bad at acting, but that she was still in the feeling she was in. She felt bad like Human and couldn’t get rid of it.”

But Byrne was also attuned to the script's underlying sense of dark humor. In a moment of weakness, Linda gives in to her daughter's incessant demands for a pet hamster. On the way home with the rodent, he scratches his box (Bronstein introduced Jack Nicholson in The Shining), and in the midst of all the madness, Linda's car rear-ends him. She gets out to confront the other driver, the hamster runs away, and then… . Let's just say that no hamsters were harmed in the making of this film.

Byrne, whose sons with Cannavale are now seven and nine, didn't have to look far to explore the growing chaos of parenthood. “My house is very noisy,” she told me. “Loud music, loud conversation. When I can shut up, I don't listen or watch anything. I just enjoy being alone. In my house, everyone is always playing loud music, and I'm trying to turn it off.” When I brought up the hamster plot in If I Had Legs, Byrne said, “I feel so deeply about this as a parent. Oh my God, what traps you fall into! And you feel like such a failure because you're like, “Why can't my child cope without X, Y, or Z? This is wrong”. their guilt. This my the fault is that they are not resilient enough or capable enough. And you immediately feel guilty, and it’s persistent.”

Rafa, one of Byrne's sons, is desperate to get a pet chameleon, but for now she's holding firm. Instead, he uses his mother's ability to improvise. “He always asks me, 'Hey mom, what if we went outside and saw a chameleon on the road and you had to pick him up and you had give it to me? What would you do? Act it out! Play it out! “Sitting opposite me, she mimed her role: she spotted an imaginary chameleon, picked it up, brought it home. It's strange that her son wants a chameleon when he already has one. ♦

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