Rose Byrne: ‘I wanted to be a serious actress. Then I realised I might be better at being funny’

Rose Byrne – international movie star and FHM Australia’s 16th sexiest woman in the world (2006) – has a terrible internet connection. It takes her two goes to join our Zoom, and from that point on she’ll freeze roughly every four minutes through our hour-long talk, get stuck in a vast range of facial expressions – aghast, amused, evasive, perturbed, shocked, etc – most of which would be deeply unflattering on a less beautiful woman.

This is frustrating, while creating a degree of instant intimacy between us, because that’s all any of us are now, isn’t it? Film stars and journalists and politicians and Pilates instructors and formerly ferocious bosses alike: defined by our internet speeds and connections, similarly reduced by their inadequacies.

“Am I back?” Byrne says, after freezing for a third time. She buries her head in her hands. “Oh shit, Polly! I’m so sorry, it’s this house. It’s like a fortress, and the reception … I’ve tried every corner. It’s a bit shit. We’ll get through it.” She’s zooming from a rented house in Sydney, to which she and her family – her partner, the actor Bobby Cannavale, and their two sons, Rocco, 5, and Rafa, 3 – fled from their home in Brooklyn, New York, in the early stages of the pandemic last year.

“It was scary, trying to figure out how to get out and be safe,” she says. “And no one knew anything, right? We were all in this boat of, ‘What is this?’ It was a very, very weird atmosphere in the city. Bobby and I went to see Girl from the North Country on Broadway, then, two days later, Broadway shut, and by that weekend it was awful. All of a sudden there was this tsunami, tidal wave, of this fearsome thing coming, then it just arrived and it was like, ‘Whoa.’ Then people we knew started to get it. Bobby lost friends.”

Byrne, 41, was born and raised in inner-Sydney’s Balmain, yet many film and TV watchers around the globe have only ever heard an American accent coming out of that face, given how many films she has made in the US in recent years.

Many, in fact, only became aware of Byrne in about 2007, when she started playing the idealistic protégée Ellen Parsons to Glenn Close’s ruthless lawyer boss Patty Hewes in the exceptional TV series Damages. They next saw her as the prissy, perfect, perfectly irritating Helen in Bridesmaids (the 2011 award-winning, box- office-demolishing comedy that made me laugh until my gut ached).

Most recently, I got to know her as activist Gloria Steinem in the extremely classy Mrs America, the TV dramatisation of the feminist battle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. On top of which, the day before our Zoom, I’d binged the first three episodes of Physical, in which Byrne plays another American, Sheila Rubin, a depressed, suppressed 1980s housewife who becomes an aerobics sensation.

Rose Byrne as aerobics sensation Sheila Rubin in the dark comedy, Physical.Credit: Apple TV+

Physical is as brilliant as it sounds. Partly on account of its dark complexities: Sheila’s unnamed, unrecognised eating disorder, her twisted relationship with her own body, and with other women – all articulated through the downward-spiralling, deathly dark washing-machine churn of a voiced-over interior monologue. But also because of its aesthetic: Sheila’s explosive perm and her workout looks. That Eric Prydz video meets the very best of Jane Fonda meets Jamie Lee Curtis in Perfect.

What was it about Physical that made you say yes in the first place, I ask. It was the wardrobe, wasn’t it? “Ha ha, yes!” she says. “Clearly. I was like, ‘I just want the highest-cut bodysuit, that’s what I want in my next part. I don’t know how, where, when, what, I just know.’ ”

That you want belted leotards with a gynaecological aspect? “Exactly. Ha ha! And the fittings, oh my God,” she says. “Those leotards, they look like, oh, you just throw on a leotard. But it is [fitted] to within an inch of its life. It was like a Marvel movie [superhero suit]. An inch higher, an inch tighter, an inch more on the butt, an inch less around the groin.”

She changes pace, grows serious. “The whole [show] to me was so interesting,” she says. “The two worlds, the duality; the duality of the aerobics world and her oppressive marriage, her illness, her terrible relationship with herself. And it felt almost like a companion piece to Mrs America, because it starts in 1981 while Mrs America finished in 1980, so it was a clear through line for me, of the disillusionment a lot of women felt after the women’s movement.”

Leotards aside, it’s Sheila’s interior monologue that gets me, I say, the harsh judgment she passes on other women; the harsher judgment she piles on to herself. While it’s awful to admit, it’s an extreme version of something familiar to me. Is destructive, self-destructive chat familiar to Byrne, too?

“Oh, I mean, particularly as a young woman, of course. There is a destructive conversation you’ve had in this business as well, trying to be a young actress, because you’re very much on display, and you’re too this or you’re not enough of that.”

What did Hollywood tell Byrne was wrong with her, I ask, but she freezes.

‘Who’s that girl trying to keep up with Glenn Close?’ Byrne with Close in the TV series Damages.Credit: Alamy

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Byrne started taking acting classes as a shy eight-year-old, discovered she was rather good at it, appeared in her first film – 1994’s Dallas Doll – aged 15, then started travelling back and forth to Los Angeles when she was 18. How was that, I ask, when she eventually unfreezes.

“It’s an overwhelming city, but I had friends. Heath [Ledger] was a good friend of mine. We’d done a film together [Two Hands in 1999] and he was incredibly generous. He would take me under his wing and help me out for those first few years, always getting me in, auditioning for his movies, putting me up at his house.”

I guess you were devastated when he died. “I mean, listen, it’s obviously a tragedy. We had come over here together, then his career went like a freight train and … it’s so sad. He had an electric kind of energy.”

I ask if she wanted to be this famous when she started out, and she says: “I was incredibly serious about acting. It was less about being famous and more about being a serious actress. Then I realised I think I might be better at being funny.”

When did she first feel famous? Was it after Damages? “No! It was more like, ‘Who’s that girl trying to keep up with Glenn Close?’ ” When, then? Was it after the movie Bridesmaids, the direct consequence of her conscious decision to ‘do’ funny?

“I mean, what famous is now is beyond my comprehension. If I talk to a 15-year-old, they just talk about YouTube or gaming; these are things in their world that are phenomenally huge, and I don’t know what they’re talking about. They wouldn’t have watched anything I’m in. Who’s famous [apart from] Beyoncé?”

Byrne in Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig.Credit: Alamy

This is a reasonable point, though it’s also typical of Byrne’s capacity to masterfully, amiably sidestep my tougher questions, and to instead slip-slide into opaque, quasi-philosophical rationales, and avoid overly personal specifics. I ask how much money matters to her, for example, and she half-sings, “Listen, let’s talk about money. Come on, money!” while shimmying, performing hypnotic luring-in motions with her hands, then … doesn’t actually talk about her relationship with money at all. And when I ask her about the real-life Gloria Steinem’s response to Mrs America – she called it “ridiculous” – Byrne distracts me by saying, “You’ve got a bit of a Gloria Steinem look happening,” which is deeply flattering (totally what I was going for) but not the point.

Miraculously, we don’t freeze again before I press her further about Steinem’s response. “Oh, she’s entitled to her opinion.” It must have been daunting to play someone still alive, I say. “I believe I tried to get out of it at one point,” she says with a laugh. I’m glad you didn’t, I say.

Steinem might not have liked Mrs America, but I loved it. Not that it has stopped Byrne agreeing to play another living person – since we spoke, it was announced that she will play the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a film about the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre, which has received criticism before it has even started filming, with claims it will focus on Ardern as a “white saviour”. Byrne has yet to comment.

Byrne as Gloria Steinem in Mrs America. Credit: Alamy

She is more forthcoming about her relationship with her partner, Bobby Cannavale. The two have been together since 2012, though they haven’t yet married. Will they?

“I keep going, ‘Let’s get around to it, let’s do it.’ And then, you know, you have a baby, and then, oh, there’s another baby,” she says. “It was kind of like that for us. I love weddings, and I know people [for whom] it’s an important thing, and I respect that totally. I guess for us it’s just been, we didn’t do it, we’ll do it, then – no! Pandemic.”

With partner Bobby Cannavale.Credit: Getty Images

She says they will go back to Brooklyn eventually: “Brooklyn is home.” When I ask what she’s doing next – meaning professionally – she says, “I’m going to bed.” Oh, I’m sorry, I say. Am I keeping you up?

“It’s 9pm, ha ha! But that is late. I’m in bed at 8.45,” she says, which I respect, because I would be, too, given half the chance.

From another room a child calls out. Byrne’s head turns sharply. “I heard a little boy! Sorry, Polly, I need to go,” she says. I feel a bit like I’m on a Tinder date with someone who arranged for a friend to text them a fake emergency get-out message at a specified time, but if so … I respect that, too.

Edited extract of a story that first appeared in The Sunday Times Style Magazine/News Licensing

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