Everyone is finally able to see Rose Byrne at her most unlikeable. As Linda in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and is out now, Byrne brings a complicated character to life straight from the brain (and life) of writer-director Mary Bronstein. Back in January, we asked Byrne about crafting her exasperated personae, working with Conan O’Brien, and if she’s ever had a ceiling crash down into her apartment.
Mary Bronstein said she’d been working on this film for a really long time. I’m curious about when you got involved.
She had been working on it seven years total from the time we started. She sent me this script through my agent, and I was like, “Oh my goodness.” It read so well. There were so many twists and turns. And the more surreal aspects of the movie were definitely on the page as well. And it’s very elevated when you see it, but it’s very much there when you read it already. Once I spoke to Mary, and it’s a very personal story to her, so that was always a great touchstone.
As a nosy actress, you want all the information, and she was extremely candid with me. We had a great rehearsal process. I think it was two months of going to her house. We would just work three or four days a week and for hours on end and just talk and often just tell stories about being a mother or our kids. But we went through every paragraph, comma, and apostrophe.
I’m curious how you developed the physicality of Linda.
I was obsessed with who she was before the crisis. That was my whole thing. Who is this woman before? Because crises reveals who you are. For me, that informed so much of her behavior during this trauma that she was experiencing. And then the technical aspect of it — I love figuring that out with the cinematographer. Linda is so disassociated from her body and herself. And that was more the intuition I had with her physicality in a way. On the first day, the camera was so close to my face, and I said, “Does it have to be that close to my face?” I’m as vain as the next person. And she was like, “Yes.”
A really remarkable formal conceit with the movie is that Linda is having this crisis with her daughter who we often hear but don’t see.
Mary always had a very clear idea to not see the daughter. I had my scene partner there the whole time, Delaney Quinn, and I rehearsed with her when she came into audition. We went through a process, and it was very important for Mary and I to always have her. So it always felt to me like she was on camera.
Were the phone-call scenes with your onscreen husband filmed in real time?
Yeah, because they’re so hard. When you’re on the phone, you act so differently, particularly if you’re talking to your partner. And she’s very angry with her husband a lot of the time, so I was very mean to Christian Slater.
So much of the movie is what Linda hears as a mother that then informs how guilty she does or doesn’t feel. Did that feel true to your experience as a parent?
Whether you are a parent or not, that feeling of suffocation, of losing your agency and burnout [happens]. Most parents won’t have gone through what Linda has gone through, but overall, it’s been nice to see people be able to relate to it.
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The other really stressful aspect of the movie is this big hole in the ceiling of her apartment. I’m curious if you’ve ever had any kind of crazy maintenance issues.
I had a really bad mice situation at one place. They were just crawling over my feet at one point. It was disgusting. I had a friend in New York in her apartment, and it happened to her. The ceiling fell through, just like in the movie. I couldn’t believe it. It was right before I started. And she was sending me this footage of these guys in crazy hazmat suits coming in to fix this.
Whether it’s the hole in her ceiling or what her daughter’s going through, the script always had a beautiful symmetry about it in representing these things. And it offers a lot of questions, not answers.
I wanted to ask about Conan O’Brien, who plays your therapist.
The national treasure, right? I’d done his show a few times and Mary had a creative vision of him. He was so collaborative and very respectful. He took it very seriously, really rehearsed with Mary extensively before I could engage because I was shooting on something else. He really delivers, and it’s not like him at all. It’s very counterintuitive. The therapist is not a great therapist, and Conan [on his show] is in a way. When you’re just talking to people all day on a show, it’s a form of therapy a little bit too. It’s a very funny portrayal and very dark, but very funny.
People keep asking me how he is in the movie, and I’m like, “Well, he’s not funny, but on purpose, which then becomes really funny.”
You expect one thing, and he’s such a recognizable figure. It’s a great ask of the audience that they have to adjust and see this restraint and tension on him.
Throughout your career, you’ve sort of moved through the independent-film space, you’ve done TV, you’ve done these really big comedies. I’m curious just how you approach projects and how you decide what mode you want to be in.
It’s what comes your way and what doesn’t. I always wanted to do comedy. I grew up watching Fawlty Towers, and I loved John Cleese, and I loved Julia Louis-Dreyfus. So that was a big turning point, being able to start to work in that genre more. A lot of your career is defined by what you don’t do as well.
There’s a lot of stress eating in this movie.
It’s a lot of stress everything. The pizza eating was a big sequence. We were very technical about that whole sequence. The discussions we had about pizza eating were hilarious. The cheese, where it goes, the this, the that. “What? Did it fall off? Did it come back on?” This whole opening sequence. A lot of smoking pot and drinking. She’s constantly trying to escape, just escape a situation, whether it’s through the breathwork she tries. It’s just this constant adrenaline of trying to escape her situation.
