Rose’s Byrning love: ‘She’s honestly the funniest chick I know’
The Aussie star walks a classy line between comedy and drama. But it was a less-than-elegant move that convinced the legendary Dolly Parton to sign off on Byrne’s latest, seriously funny film.
If you think about it too much, it all gets pretty weird. Here’s the ethereal Rose Byrne, impersonating a man impersonating Elvis Presley, a long-time idol of her US actor husband, Bobby Cannavale, who plays a man impersonating Neil Diamond. Throw in Byrne’s childhood best friend Krew Boylan, with a role as a woman impersonating Dolly Parton. That woman, in the new Australian comedy Seriously Red, has a fling with Byrne’s Elvis-impersonating man, who never appears with Neil Diamond but who, in essence, owes his very existence as a character to Cannavale’s off-screen schooling of his wife in everything Elvis.
“Bobby’s the music aficionado,” Byrne, 43, says, skating airily over the convoluted absurdity of the set-up. (She’s Zooming in from the loungeroom of the couple’s Brooklyn brownstone, where a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Rod Stewart lurks solemnly in the background, so she’s clearly accustomed to weird.) It’s Bobby, 52, who lives and breathes music, she says, and he has dominion over the household speakers. He’s into Neil Diamond, sure; he’ll sing Holly Holy at karaoke. But it’s Elvis he truly loves. He devoured part one of Peter Guralnick’s definitive biography Last Train to Memphis, sharing chapters with Byrne throughout. She learnt about The King’s Tupelo, Mississippi childhood, his Army posting and the years of delirious adulation before Elvis became posthumous fodder for impersonators. “All of that was in my memory and subconscious when we started filming,” Byrne says.
Her lizard-lidded Elvis appears early in Seriously Red, pompadoured and pouting, frozen at his 1960s-era peak, purring Return to Sender on stage before whisking Dolly Parton off for a roll in the hay. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part. In the spirit of the film, the raucous feature debut of director Gracie Otto, it’s patently ridiculous. But it’s typical of Byrne that she went all in. “Obviously, the limitations of how much I was going to actually look like Elvis spoke for themselves,” she says, “but I watched hours and hours of footage because I wanted to capture that incredible presence that he had.”
Byrne takes her comedy seriously. Out on the tightrope where classically trained dramatic actors do the funny stuff – a state almost as perilous as the other way round – she knows it’s madness to perform without a net. Comedy, tragedy: just two extremes of the human psyche. “It’s the same amount of work that you do, with the script and everything like that,” she says, “but on top of that you’ve got to get a laugh.”
It was producer Judd Apatow who first saw the funny side of the Balmain-born Byrne, although close friends had been yucking it up at her goofball antics for years. “She is honestly the funniest chick I know,” says Boylan, calling attention to her friend’s hilariously uninhibited Tasmanian devil impression.
Hollywood’s comedy kingmaker looked beyond the solemn Byrne of Troy, Marie Antoinette and her Emmy-nominated role in the hit TV show Damages, and cast her as an oversexed pop star in Get Him to the Greek. Then he altered the course of her career with a role in the pioneering 2011 blockbuster Bridesmaids (“a triumph for vomit and feminism”, one critic declared). Comic roles came thick and fast: Spy, Instant Family, Irresistible, Bad Neighbours and its sequel. She’s currently giving the performance of her life as a repressed 1980s housewife in the dark aerobics TV comedy Physical, recently renewed for season three.
Byrne has worked with a who’s who of comedy – Steve Carrell, Melissa McCarthy, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill – and now takes her place among them as Australia’s comic queen exported to the world. This career move was more of a pirouette than a pivot, because Byrne is a dainty sprite who floats above such manoeuvring with the airy unconcern of a leaf in the breeze. Indeed, many of her best comic performances rely for their kick on her hovering, wraith-like, at one remove from sometimes crass material. It’s the juxtaposition that makes it so funny.
“Kids just suck, don’t they?” She mutters this under her breath, and I think I’ve misheard her. Byrne is sympathising with some screen issues I’ve shamelessly blamed on my youngest. She’s having issues of her own, disappearing at one point for a nine-minute interval, the unavoidable response to a plaintive cry from upstairs, where she thought her two boys, Rocco, 6, and Rafa, 5, were tucked tightly into bed. I must have misheard her because, later, she will articulate a loving and joyous description of motherhood, and it’s probably just a projection because it’s 9pm in Brooklyn: the witching hour.
Byrne is wearing jeans and a baggy grey jumper and, with the boys back in bed, she visibly relaxes. She tucks one leg up on the chair. Cardboard Rod Stewart watches from his corner. (Turns out, he’s a set souvenir from Cannavale’s stint as a 1970s record executive on Martin Scorsese’s TV series Vinyl.)
So, what did the Elvis aficionado think of her impersonation? “I think Bobby got a kick out of it,” she says. “Although I don’t know if he’d hire me to, like, play a party.” There was a time when Byrne was wary of working with friends and with her husband, a two-time Emmy winner currently starring as Joe DiMaggio in Blonde and with Naomi Watts in Netflix’s The Watcher. “I think I felt that I needed to keep it church and state,” she says. “Friendships; work. Relationship; work. Now I’m just like, why? I love working with Bobby and I love working with my friends and it’s a creative conversation that keeps going.”
Seriously Red marks the ninth time Byrne and Cannavale have worked together, making the extremely attractive pair this generation’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. With the on-screen chemistry; without the off-screen drama. They’ve been together since 2012, introduced by a mutual friend during Byrne’s five-season run on Damages, and have co-starred in the 2014 Annie remake; with Melissa McCarthy in Spy; and as husband and wife in the indie comedy Adult Beginners.
As a couple they are every bit as enigmatic as Byrne herself, who wears an air of serene detachment and has a deft way of shooing away questions that edge close to the force-field of privacy she maintains. “Hmmm,” she’ll say agreeably, without answering. Her tranquil affect prompted Troy director Wolfgang Petersen to say she had “the face of a Madonna” and Cannavale’s best friend, actor Joe Lo Truglio, once likened her to a “relaxed cumulus cloud”.
Though she calls Cannavale her husband, they’re not legally married. Haven’t found the time. The power pair keep it low-key in a cosy enclave of Brooklyn in a row house painted a subtle ballerina pink. The family-friendly neighbourhood has been home base since 2016, and it’s clear there’s a pragmatic aspect to their joint work: it’s easier for the family to travel wholesale on extended work trips. They’ve filmed in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Sydney and Toronto, but their current project, playing husband and bitter ex-wife opposite Robert de Niro in the comedy Inappropriate Behaviour, is just a subway ride away in Cannavale’s home state of New Jersey.
“You know it’s funny, I’m very at ease acting with Bobby,” she says. “Before we were together, we were friends, and I always admired him as an actor. He’s very professional. We don’t really bring our domestic life into [our performances], because it’s all there anyway.” She mock-scolds-He didn’t do the dishes! – and produces a musical laugh. “We’re certainly not dredging up stories from home to inspire us in scenes or anything like that. And it’s far more dramatic on set! I mean, it’s much less interesting at home than people think, just the day-to-day domestic grind like anybody, so when we’re working together it feels very lucky. It’s a real pleasure.”
Occasionally, they’ll workshop scripts at home but “when you’ve got two little kids, you’re kind of in the trenches, so you’re pretty tired,” she says. “Usually, it’s a race to see who can get to bed first, which is incredibly sexy.” Parenthood might put speed bumps in the bedroom, but she wouldn’t trade it.
“It really is like a reinvention of being alive in a way,” she says. “It’s a reset of everything, because you’re witnessing the magic trick of this person showing up before you day by day, being put together and revealing themselves before your eyes. It changes you on a molecular level.”
“She is honestly the funniest chick I know,” says Boylan
Byrne and Cannavale attend the theatre the way others go to the movies, up to three times a week, and they both relish performing on the stage. They teamed up for a sold-out run of Medea, Australian Simon Stone’s updated version of the brutal Greek classic, at Brooklyn Academy of Music – “incredibly daunting, but thrilling” – just before the pandemic hit. (Covid-19 upended plans to co-star in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of A View from the Bridge, another fraught marital drama.)
“Three days after we’d finished our Medea run, Broadway shut down for the first time ever,” she says. “It was a strange feeling because everybody was starting to live in fear and the news was getting worse and worse. It was like the apocalypse was arriving.” Byrne refers to the coronavirus pandemic a number of times, and it’s clear she’s still reeling from the havoc it wreaked in her adopted city. “We knew so many people who got ill,” she says. “We had friends who died. It was terrible.”
They were grateful to relocate the family to Australia in the latter half of 2020 so Cannavale could film Nine Perfect Strangers in northern NSW. “Any chance to come home and work is a glorious gift,” says Byrne, who recently signed on to voice Tourism Australia’s CGI global ambassador, Ruby the Roo. “I was so excited for Bobby to have that experience and, also, Australia was this bizarrely safe oasis where life had continued. It was like a lottery ticket being able to get out of America.”
Byrne was a shy kid. She grew up the youngest off our in Sydney’s picturesque harbourside suburb of Balmain, being drip-fed episodes of Seinfeld (her brother George’s favourite) and Fawlty Towers (a singular obsession of her father Robin). Her dad, a statistician, and mother Jane, a primary school administrator, thought drama classes might bring her out of her shell, and so she joined ATYP (Australian Theatre for Young People) at age eight and fell in love. Of the actors who want to be seen and those who want to disappear, she says, she sits firmly in the latter camp.
In 1999, she studied at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York and has since become one of the leading proponents of Practical Aesthetics, an action-based acting technique developed by founders David Mamet and William H. Macy. That same year, she landed a starring role in the Australian crime caper Two Hands, opposite a young Heath Ledger, and set her feet on the road to stardom.
Boylan has watched her friend’s elegant transition from timid teen to Hollywood heavyweight with pride. “She’s changed in all the best possible ways,” she says. “Her sense of humour and humility is the same, but she’s gotten wiser and stronger. In this industry, you’ll always find strength when you can take a little bit more control of your career.”
Boylan began penning the Seriously Red script 10 years ago as a way of working through her own issues with fame and identity. She takes the lead role as a chaotic redhead who tosses in her nine-to-five job to become a tribute performer, and thought Byrne would welcome the chance to stretch, as an Elvis impersonator. “It’s amazing how easy she makes it look,” says Boylan. “There’s no prosthetics, it’s just makeup and shading. People who’ve seen it say they had no idea it was Rose.”
Seriously Red is the first feature under the banner of Dollhouse Pictures, the Sydney-based collective Byrne formed in 2015 with industry friends Boylan, Otto, Shannon Murphy and Jessica Carrera to prioritise female-driven storytelling. Next, they will adapt Hannah Kent’s bestselling novel Devotion for the big screen, and Sally Piper’s psychological thriller The Geography of Friendship is in development as a six-part series.
Byrne says Dollhouse was inspired by Blue-Tongue Films, another Sydney-based collective, founded in part by her film-maker friends Joel and Nash Edgerton. “Nash has been an unofficial mentor and I’m also inspired by other actresses who’ve paved the way in getting their own material, finding scripts and putting them on the big screen,” she says. “Our industry is small and delicate in Australia. We have so much talent, but getting people in to see Australian films still can be challenging.”
As executive producer on Seriously Red, Byrne was responsible for wooing Dolly Parton, whose greatest hits underpin the film. “We wouldn’t have been able to do the film at all without her blessing,” she says. “Because we had, you know, $8.50 to make the movie and to try to get the rights was a Hail Mary.” Seven months pregnant with Rocco, she drove to Tennessee, script in hand, to pitch Parton’s manager, Danny Nozell. “I said, ‘This is a love letter to her, to her songs and her legacy’ and she read it and gave us her blessing.”
As well as producing with Dollhouse Pictures, Byrne serves as an executive producer on Physical and the upcoming TV series Platonic, in which she reteams with her Bad Neighbours director Nick Stoller and co-star Rogen. Physical’s Sheila Rubin, a tortured Californian housewife who steps up to become a prototype for today’s fitness influencers, is “a beast of a character”, she says proudly. The show is, in a sense, a companion piece to the fact-based miniseries Mrs America, in which Byrne played feminist icon Gloria Steinem opposite Cate Blanchett’s conservative anti-feminism activist Phyllis Schlafly.
“The world of Mrs America was so fascinating, particularly coming from the Trump years and sort of trying to reverse-engineer how we got there,” she says. “And then the 1980s world of Physical was just so vivid with this woman still trapped in her marriage, despite the feminist movement having exploded in the last decade, and then finding agency through starting a business and making money.”
The fact that one feminist entertainment is a drama and the other a comedy is instructive. Byrne can see-saw between straight and funny roles standing on her head. But the magic is in between, in the elusive sweet spot where one provides an authentic counterpart to the other. Byrne has that nailed, although she’s airily dismissive of any grand plan.
“You can wish and plan and hope but it’s about what roles come your way and what don’t and just navigating through that,” she says. “In addition, my partner’s an actor, we have two children, and I’m just juggling the whole work-life thing, like every working parent.”
Seriously Red is in cinemas from November 24