Her comedic pivot would have to wait, though. After a stint living in London, she moved to New York to co-star with Glenn Close in “Damages,” the FX legal drama, which débuted in 2007 and ran for five seasons. Byrne played a dewy but sharp junior associate drawn into Close’s power-hungry machinations. Like Elisabeth Moss in “Mad Men,” which arrived on cable the same year, Byrne played an acolyte who grew from diffident to dominant over the course of the show’s run. Her performance bolstered her reputation as a dramatic force and earned her two Emmy nominations.
It wasn’t until Stoller was casting “Get Him to the Greek” (2010), starring Russell Brand as the louche rocker Aldous Snow, that Byrne finally got to unleash her inner buffoon. She had made a conscious decision to pursue comedic roles, but Stoller was perplexed when she auditioned for the part of Jackie Q, Aldous’s wild-child pop-star girlfriend. “I knew Rose’s work from ‘Damages’ and ‘Sunshine,’ ” Stoller explained. “I saw that she was going to come in to read, and my initial thought was, Why is Rose Byrne reading for this? She’s so dramatic. Then she came in, and she just destroyed. It was just one of the funniest auditions I’ve ever seen.” (The audition tape is preserved online.) On set, Stoller said, Byrne was an “improv machine,” particularly during her “flirtatious conversations with the since fallen and disreputable Russell Brand.”
Soon enough, she was riding a wave of twenty-tens big-screen comedy, including “Bridesmaids” (2011), which may have had the best female comedic ensemble since “All About Eve.” (She reteamed with her co-star Melissa McCarthy in “Spy,” playing a haughty villainess.) In 2014, Stoller directed her again, in “Neighbors,” about a war between a yuppie couple with a baby and a frat house next door. Playing Seth Rogen’s wife might have landed her in Katherine Heigl territory, but, Stoller recalled, “Her main note on that movie, which was correct, was ‘I don’t want to be the nag.’ She was, like, ‘If I’m married to Seth, I’m his partner in crime.’ ” In one indelible scene, her lactating breasts get so backed up that her husband is forced to milk her—the kind of gross-out body humor that is usually applied to dicks and butts, not the sainted maternal form. (Stoller said that Byrne was iffy on the scene, until he assured her that this had actually happened to the wife of one of the screenwriters.)
Byrne’s chemistry with Rogen was so good that Stoller reassembled them for “Platonic.” “She has an amazing ability to play beta,” Stoller explained. “She’ll play low status, but you can see in her eyes she desperately wishes she was high status.” The press was delighted, and a little baffled, that such a genteel-looking leading lady seemed to possess the soul of Jonah Hill. Vanity Fair, in 2018, called her a “Comic Superstar Flying Surprisingly Under the Radar,” impressed that, after “Damages,” she had sidestepped the “obvious echelon: that of the dramatic actress who regularly appears in grim Oscar bait and moody indie-house fare.”
If you’re feeling ungenerous, you might call “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” grim Oscar bait and moody indie-house fare. But, after a decade and a half of comedic roles, it feels like more of a counterintuitive move for Byrne than an inevitable one. At times, it sinks into abject despair. At one point, Linda is talking to her own therapist (played, in a truly surprising bit of genre shock, by Conan O’Brien), who treats her with chilly reserve. “Just tell me what to do,” she pleads, sobbing and curling up on his couch. “I just want someone to tell me what to do.”
“When we shot that scene, it was so emotionally deep,” Bronstein told me. “Later, Rose came up to me and was, like, ‘You know, I feel like I didn’t nail that.’ I was, like, ‘Are you crazy? You did nail it. I would never move on if you didn’t.’ What I realized was that it wasn’t that she thought that she didn’t do a good job at acting—it’s that she was still in that feeling that she had gotten into. She was feeling bad as a person and wasn’t able to shake it off.”
But Byrne was also attuned to the script’s undercurrent of pitch-dark humor. In a moment of weakness, Linda caves to her daughter’s incessant demands for a pet hamster. On the car ride home with the rodent, it claws at its box—Bronstein envisioned Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”—and, amid all the frenzy, Linda’s car gets rear-ended. She gets out to confront the other driver, the hamster escapes, 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 need to look far to research the compounding chaos of parenthood. “My house is very loud,” she told me. “Loud music, loud talking. When I can get quiet, I don’t listen to anything or watch anything. I just enjoy the solitude. Everyone’s always turning it up in my house, and I’m trying to turn it down.” When I brought up the hamster subplot in “If I Had Legs,” Byrne said, “I relate to that so deeply, being a parent. Oh, my gosh, the pitfalls 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? That’s not their fault. That’s my fault that they’re not resilient enough or not capable enough. And you immediately feel guilty, and it’s relentless.”
Rafa, one of Byrne’s sons, desperately wants a pet chameleon, but so far she has held firm. Instead, he’s been summoning his mother’s powers of improv. “He’s always asking me, ‘Hey, Mom, what if we went outside and there was a chameleon on the road, and you had to pick it up, and you had to give it to me? What would you do? Act it out! Act it out!’ ” Sitting across from me, she pantomimed her part: noticing the imaginary chameleon, picking it up, bringing it home. Strange that her son wants a chameleon when he already has one. ♦
