Rose Byrne is the toast of Hollywood

ROSE Byrne moves effortlessly from hard-hitting drama to comedy. No wonder she's the toast of Hollywood.

Rose Byrne

HERE'S Rose Byrne, sitting pretty in her high-ceilinged New York apartment, looking down on the bustle and blur of the East Village and contemplating a bike ride.

The season's in that sweet spot between extremes: the honey locust and ginkgo trees on the street below wear an autumnal blush and the summer crowds have thinned. The 34-year-old Australian actress has a new boyfriend, the blockbuster comedy Bridesmaids has made her a household name, and her Hollywood career is in overdrive. There's Vegemite in the fridge and a girlfriend is winging her way from Sydney with emergency Tim Tam rations. All is right with the world.

But if you were a New York pigeon, say, and you alighted on the windowsill to peek inside, the look of melancholia etched on this young woman's fragile-looking face might break your heart. It's as if Byrne has just been struck by the beautiful impermanence of all human existence and the realisation has brought her to the brink of tears.

No, no, no, she says, and laughs loud and long to prove her good cheer. It is, she insists, just the way her features fall in repose. "I'm not sure why, I think it's my facial structure, but I have a certain look on my face of melancholy that is almost always not the case, so it can be quite misleading," she says. "Even my mother will say, 'Rose, what's wrong?' and I'm fine."

This look, deceptive as it is, has not gone unnoticed in Hollywood. "Why the long face?" wonder those whose business it is to comment on red-carpet appearances by starlets. "She looks in desperate need of cheering up," one tabloid worried over some recent paparazzi street snaps. It's probably why, Byrne surmises, she was always offered "the serious stuff" when it came to film roles. Until recently. Turns out, the girl with the sad face makes people laugh. Byrne - dainty, intelligent and somewhat mysterious - is Australia's new comic superstar, with two big-screen comedies already this year, another three in production, and a modern remake of the classic musical Annie in the offing. Even her role in The Turning, a new film based on a collection of short stories by Tim Winton, shows she has a knack for finding that elusive spot between comedy and tragedy where all good drama dwells.

Of course, her friends could have told us that. They know "a natural goofball" who is "freakin' hilarious"; a woman who was weaned on Fawlty Towers due to her father's singular obsession; who does a very funny Tasmanian Devil impression and has been known to break into a simulation of the famously arrhythmic, foot-jerking "Elaine dance" from Seinfeld. But for much of her career Byrne had hidden that light side under a bushel, turning her solemn face to the camera in dramas such as Troy, Sunshine, Marie Antoinette and the hit US legal thriller, Damages.

We must thank the gods of comedy, then, for producer Judd Apatow. The man behind hits such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up has steered the careers of Jason Segel, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen to greatness, and is so influential in Hollywood that a phrase has been coined to describe his inner circle of comic actors: the Apatow Universe. He watched Byrne in her Emmy-nominated turn opposite Glenn Close in Damages and something about her intense young attorney, Ellen, made him think of her for the part of Russell Brand's flamboyant pop star girlfriend in 2010's Get Him to the Greek. Huh?

"That surprised me too," Byrne laughs. "But I just really appreciate him having an open mind. It's great for actors that someone like Judd Apatow is willing to give anyone a shot. I was able to get in off a show that clearly was a very intense drama and have the opportunity to see if I could do something funny."

As Jackie Q, the narcissistic foil to Brand's wasted rock princeling, she proved she was wired for funny. It was an unpredictable, unhinged performance that relied for much of its kick on Byrne's naturally innocent demeanour being paired with outrageously bawdy lines. (If in doubt, watch the YouTube clips of Jackie Q's Supertight and Ring Around My Rosie. Make sure the kids aren't around.) "It was such a liberating part," Byrne says. "It was a very exciting turning point, professionally, for me. I'm not saying I'm like that character but it's pretty goofy and I was far more able to make fun of myself than I'd been allowed to until then."

From there it was a short hop to the Apatow-produced Bridesmaids, in which she adopted a pitch-perfect American accent to play Helen, the ultra-competitive nemesis of Kristen Wiig's dishevelled maid-of-honour. Byrne's breakthrough comic film was not just a comedy, but the comedy of 2011. With its pioneering mash-up of vivid gross-out gags and chick-flick milieu ("a triumph for vomit and feminism," salon.com declared), the Oscar-nominated film made almost $300 million and shone an overdue spotlight on women in comedy. It didn't win at the Academy Awards the following year but Byrne and her Bridesmaids co-star Melissa McCarthy, on stage to present an Oscar, livened up proceedings by whipping out airplane-sized bottles of vodka on stage and doing shots. The girl from Balmain, Sydney, had arrived.

Byrne grew up the youngest of four in a "big, chaotic", Brady-Bunch-happy home in the picturesque harbourside suburb, where the only television show her now-retired statistician father Robin watched was Fawlty Towers. Young Rose caught the acting bug early, playing Mary Poppins in a Balmain Primary School production before joining the Australian Theatre For Young People at the age of eight. As a teenager, she landed a role in the movie Dallas Doll.

She remembers being schooled in the art of comedy early, watching endless episodes of Seinfeld with her brother, George, and being drip-fed the ingenious slapstick of John Cleese. Robin and her mother Jane, a former primary school administrator, "have very good senses of humour", she says. "They're very dry. My father is a little eccentric and so I think it's just growing up with two role models who had a healthy sense of the absurd, that's probably where it initially started. And, I'm not sure, but there's something about being the youngest, you've got some sort of predilection to being goofy."

Byrne took her acting seriously, though, and spent the northern summer of 1999 at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York, learning an acting technique called "practical aesthetics" developed by David Mamet and William H. Macy. That year, she starred in the crime caper Two Hands opposite a young unknown named Heath Ledger and was suddenly anointed Australian cinema's new It Girl. A best actress award at the Venice Film Festival in 2000 for The Goddess of 1967 followed, and she had a bit part as Natalie Portman's handmaiden in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones ("I just stood by looking very serious," she says, but the role won her geek credentials - she still gets fan letters). Next, Byrne undertook the arduous task of playing Brad Pitt's lover in 2004's Troy. Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle saw her in Troy ("The camera just adores her," he has said) and cast her in his sci-fi thriller Sunshine as well as the zombie horror film 28 Weeks Later, both in 2007.

Soon after, her funny-girl streak began with Get Him to The Greek and Bridesmaids. And 2013 has been an especially productive year: she played a lead role in the British romantic comedy I Give It a Year (where she turned her real-life phobia of birds into a very funny slapstick scene with Simon Baker and a couple of confused doves), guest-starred on the sketch comedy show Portlandia, and appeared with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in The Internship.

While continuing to seesaw between light and dark - she has also just hit the No. 1 spot at the US box office with the horror film Insidious: Chapter 2, the sequel to the 2010 hit - Byrne is keen to expand her comedic repertoire. Next year, she's in the frat-boy comedy Neighbours with Zac Efron and Seth Rogen, This Is Where I Leave You with Tina Fey and Jason Bateman, and a romantic comedy with Jason Sudeikis called Tumbledown.

"I find comedy just so much harder, I think it's so underrated," Byrne says. "It's just, you know, it's like doing a drama but on top of that you've got to get a laugh. And for me it can only really come from something authentic; you can't fabricate it at all. It's a whole different side of your brain, I think, and it's very, very hard." She's still honing her improvisation skills, but has definitely improved when it comes to suppressing on-set giggles, what those in the industry call "breaking". "I used to crack up all the time but I've gotten better, I have," she says.

Byrne admits she was a shy kid and, despite her success, she comes across as patently unstarry, a humility that singles her out in an industry built on relentless self-promotion. (When she won her best actress award in Venice, she reportedly said: "It's a bit surreal; they must have had slim pickings.") In conversation she conveys an irrepressible sunniness; her laugh bubbles up from a wellspring and she responds with a soft "Oh wow" when she's paid a compliment. She seems universally well liked; even strangers are moved to pay tribute (see the appreciation blog Hell Yeah Rose Byrne!) "She's still a Balmain girl," says her childhood friend, Australian actress Krew Boylan, who's been swapping insomnia remedies with Byrne since relocating to the city that never sleeps last month. "She loves Vegemite, going to the beach, shopping, all the normal stuff, although she has stepped it up on the Champagne front. There is less sparkling wine in her fridge these days."

This is the Byrne she knows: a Kylie Minogue fan from way back; a devoted fashionista who's just as happy in jeans; an avid reader and a reluctant cook ("Spinach pie is her one and only dish"). Asked about her A-list mate's reputation for looking down in the dumps, Boylan says: "Yes, the sad thing. That's been talked about, but I honestly don't recognise it as being melancholy. Maybe because I know her, I know that it's her thinking and concentrating face."

Still, when Byrne began filming on The Turning, she felt obliged to warn her director about the pitfalls of an unguarded moment. "It was one of the first things she said when we started working together," says Claire McCarthy, who directed the omnibus film's centrepiece segment. "She said, 'You've just got to be conscious of this, but sometimes when I'm still, I look really melancholy.' It was such a strange thing to say. When she's talking and being herself, she's funny and natural and very open, but there is something captivating about her stillness - she has this kind of tragic beauty."

Picture this scene during filming of The Turning: Byrne is drifting among the stalls at the Kelmscott Annual Show in suburban Perth. As she moves between the goat milk soap and potted plants, the air fragrant with a fairground potpourri of farm animals and hot grease, there's little evidence of the impeccably spackled and coiffed red-carpet habitue. Today, Rose is Raelene, and she's in deep. She's wearing tracky-daks. With a tramp stamp, stringy, flat-ironed hair and teeth the colour of hollandaise sauce, Rose-as-Raelene looks like a person who exists in life, not the movies.

Byrne first encountered the character Raelene, a battered wife with two young children living in a caravan park in the backblocks of Western Australia, in the pages of Tim Winton's 2005 short story collection. She fell under her spell - "something about the hope of that character" - and could not stop thinking about a story that was "so moving, quintessentially Australian and, well, spiritual". Early last year, she heard about a madly ambitious project that Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly was producing, corralling 17 Australian directors, each with their own cast and crew, to interpret Winton's interwoven tales of damaged small-town lives. Her agent put out feelers and learnt that McCarthy, whom she knew socially, was at the helm of Raelene's story. Byrne wanted in.

"The project really excited me; it felt unique and ambitious," she says now. "I don't get offered those sorts of roles. I've been doing a lot of comedies lately and it was a really challenging part, obviously very far from who I am. So that really interested me, being scared of doing something so different from anything I'd done before. I've long loved this story, and to bring to life something that I'd so enjoyed as a reader was really thrilling."

With her face resembling, in the words of Winton's book, "a bad job from the panel beater", Byrne barely recognised herself. "Half the time I was wearing makeup for bruises and then makeup on top of the makeup that Raelene would use to cover the bruises," she recalls. "And then there were the hair extensions and the weird false teeth - it was a very creative part of the process, her look coming together."

Byrne delves into the conflicting emotions roiling beneath the surface as Raelene is subjected to repeated beatings by a vicious husband she still half-loves. When she meets a born-again Christian (Miranda Otto) in the caravan park and is intrigued by the liberation her new friend finds in her faith, the story swings towards hope. Byrne conveys all this in a cowed but gutsy stance, and she is pleased to hear her character's scrappiness has been getting a laugh in screenings. "What's great about [Raelene] is her strength and her resilience and her cheekiness. One of the big things as a performer is to try, even in very serious things, to find the comedy. Claire [McCarthy] could see me naturally going towards those sorts of things, so she was great at encouraging some of the comic stuff a bit more. Tim Winton has that in his writing too, even in tragic stories; his observations are really wry and observant."

Byrne seems interested in a world that is tipped sideways to expose its weirder edge. She's a lateral thinker, and brings that slant to her acting. "When she approaches material she's never going to give you a choice that's boring or expected," says McCarthy. "She doesn't play it straight; the way she thinks about things, she's on a curious plane in a way ... there's something about her where she captures the comedy and tragedy thing in one person."

Connolly, the producer, has been following Byrne's career since Two Hands ("I thought she was a revelation in that") and calls her performance in The Turning "staggering". "I always find with great actors, it's like singers who can't sing out of tune," he says. "You get an opera singer and you ask them to act in a way where they have to sing out of tune, and they can't ever really do it. Actors like Rose Byrne you find compelling because they can't sing out of tune."

Funny he should say that because, back in New York, Byrne has been taking singing lessons. She's just landed a role in the upcoming Jay-Z/Will Smith remake of the musical Annie, with Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, and Quvenzhane Wallis in the title role. Byrne will play Grace, Daddy Warbucks' elegant, warm-hearted secretary. "I'm not a natural singer at all, so it's very challenging," Byrne says.

She and Boylan holidayed on Fire Island, New York, over the Labor Day weekend last month, and Byrne had her friend in stitches with impromptu rehearsals. "She showed me a dance routine, sang me a song and pretended to do calisthenics while reading from Lady Chatterley's Lover, all of which amused me no end," Boylan says.

It's not such a hard-knock life in New York City, the undisputed hub of aspiration and possibility, where Byrne has been based since signing on to Damages in 2007. "It's an extreme city, intense and non-stop, and I can see how people burn out, but for me the city is still inspiring and I get energised by it," she says. She's close to her family and travels back to Australia often, but thinks she might stay a little longer, maybe look at another TV series, a comedy this time. (She's a big fan of the Apatow-produced Girls.)

An enthusiastic participant in NYC's new bike-sharing service, Citi Bike, she's taken to spruiking the wonders of the bright blue two-wheelers. "They're fantastic!" she says. "I've been riding all over the city. I was initially scared of the traffic and the smog, and I still think I might need to get a gas mask, but it's really fast and it's really fun. And it's a bit of fitness. I get a Citi Bike every chance I get - I think I'm a little bit faddish like that, though, and maybe my enthusiasm will run out. But I'm an annual member, so I'd better stay for another year at least."

There's something else keeping Byrne in the city: a romance she's less keen to discuss. She and 43-year-old American actor Bobby Cannavale - who's in Woody Allen's new movie Blue Jasmine, and is soon to star alongside Byrne in Annie - flew under the radar with their relationship for six months, a near-impossible feat in this celebrity-obsessed age. They finally went public in June and, at last month's Emmy Awards, Cannavale called Byrne "the love of my life" while accepting an award for his role in the period mob drama Boardwalk Empire. In photos from the event Byrne looks typically chic in a pale pink Calvin Klein gown with honey-coloured highlights in her hair. She also looks a bit sad, but that's just how she rolls.