photographY DAVID ROEMER STYLING NAOMI SMITH WORDS ALEXANDRA ENGLISH
She’s worked with just about every A-lister you can think of in every genre there is. But with her new, nerve-shredding project, Rose Byrne has entered uncharted territory
That I’ve caught Byrne in the in-between of work and motherhood is fitting, because it segues nicely into her new project and the reason for my call, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, Legs is a film about a woman, Linda (Byrne), on the brink as she attempts to cope with an increasingly unwell child, a husband who travels for work, a collapsed ceiling and flooded apartment, a temporary relocation to a dodgy seaside motel and an endless barrage of clients at her therapy practice.
The film is a masterclass in how to make an audience feel claustrophobic for one hour and 53 minutes, with just enough restraint to keep it from being unbearable. For the majority of Legs, the camera is less than arm’s length away from Byrne’s face. Her daughter is only seen once; otherwise, she’s shown in magnified fragments: a leg swinging, an ear being whispered into, fingers playing with food. Her illness is a mystery, but bears similarities to ARFID, a fear- and anxiety-based aversion to food that’s so severe it develops from “fussy eating” to an eating disorder. Doctors are seeing cases rise in the United States, where Legs is set. The Butterfly Foundation found that in Australia it’s as common as anorexia nervosa, affecting about 3 percent of people.
Talent: Rose Byrne
Editor: Georgie McCourt
Creative Director: Rebecca Rhodes
Stylist: Naomi Smith
Photographer: David Roemer
Hair: Renato Campora
Makeup: Soo Park
Producer: Gillian Avertick & Robyn Fay Perkins
Wearing: Gucci
Born in Sydney’s harbourside Balmain, Byrne was famously rejected by some of Australia’s top drama schools. Not one to be deterred, she continued auditioning and, in the ’90s, became a fixture of Australian television and cinema, appearing in shows such as the 1995 soap opera Echo Point and the 1997 crime drama series Wildside.
In 1999, she played Heath Ledger’s love interest, Alex, in Two Hands, inspired by the young bouncers director Gregor Jordan had seen in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Twenty-five years after two Aussie teens were catapulted to stardom, the film is reportedly getting a sequel, though it’s unconfirmed whether Byrne would reprise her role.
The same year Two Hands was released, 20-year-old Byrne moved to New York to study at the Off-Broadway Atlantic Theatre Company. A “theatre nerd” since she was eight, Byrne made her Broadway debut in 2014 in You Can’t Take It With You. (In 2020, she and her partner, Bobby Cannavale, appeared onstage together in a contemporary version of the Greek classic Medea, about a straying husband and murderous wife, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Next year, she’ll return to the stage for the first time in five years for Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels. “I’m terrified,” she confesses.)
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At times, Legs threatens to turn supernatural, but instead maintains a hallucinogenic, Lynchian type of surrealism. Linda, stoned and drunk on what more palatable films would call “mummy juice” (read: white wine), has compulsions to escape the motel at night to check on the gaping hole in her ceiling. Golden orbs draw her into the vortex, a portal into the darkest recesses of her mind where there lies either a lightning-bolt moment of resolution or sweet obliteration. “The audience is really only in her perspective and, like her, isn’t sure what’s real and what isn’t,” says Byrne. “There are a lot of horror tropes in there, but also such gallows humour. It defies a lot of genres.”
In less capable directorial hands, Legs could have also turned into a romance. When motel superintendent James (A$AP Rocky) helps Linda buy drugs on the dark web (or, rather, the other way around), she could have easily slipped between his sheets, but it doesn’t seem to occur to her. “Rocky has such supernatural charm you immediately and understandably think, ‘Oh, this is going to happen,’ but it never falls into that cliché,” Byrne says. Linda doesn’t need a knight; she knows love is not going to save her. She needs help. And no-one is listening.
Legs is hard to define. It’s a dark comedy about the particular hell of mothering a sick child, based on a time in Bronstein’s life when her daughter was seven and so unwell she needed a feeding tube. Their family lived in New York, but treatment was only available in San Diego, so Bronstein and her daughter moved into a motel room for eight months. The space was so claustrophobic, Bronstein could only find peace in the bathroom: she ate peanut butter cups in there, drank $10 wine in there and started writing Legs in there. The film isn’t so much a factual account of that time, but more a reflection of what was emotionally true: that when a crisis has everything to do with a person you love, you can feel consumed to the point of disappearing, pulled into a black hole.
In a stroke of genius (or caustic self-flagellation), Bronstein cast herself as Dr Spring, who is in charge of the care of Linda’s daughter. She repeatedly scolds Linda for not reaching her daughter’s target weight, presenting a threateningly vague new “level of care”. She berates Linda and questions her competence, before inviting her to a workshop for parents titled “It’s Not Your Fault”.
These mothers are nocturnal, coming into their own after dark, because by day they can barely move for the weight of responsibility and dissatisfaction. They’re all losing their grip on reality: is she really turning into a dog? Is the ceiling hole really beckoning her in? Is that motorcyclist really there? Another common factor in these depictions of heterosexual motherhood is an absent father. In Die My Love, Jackson can’t seem to understand the place his wife has gone to in motherhood, nor does he seem interested in trying to. This is true of Nightbitch, where the artist’s husband decides he’ll be the one to go back to work when the couple aren’t happy with their toddler’s daycare. It’s also true of an earlier work about maternal ambivalence, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel of the same name. In it, Leda (played by Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley) tries to balance work with the unending demands of motherhood, while her oblivious husband’s work takes precedence over her own. It’s also true twice over in Legs – Linda’s ship captain husband is literally out to sea, while one of her clients, a young mother played by Danielle Macdonald who appears to be in the depths of post-partum psychosis, has a husband (also a disembodied male voice on speaker phone) who refuses to help: the baby is his wife’s responsibility.
Rose Byrne wears Loewe dress and shoes, POA.
“I look at my mother’s generation and think, ‘They didn’t have this at all.’ This is an extraordinary time and I’m excited to be alive for it”
November will also see the release of Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s film starring Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a new mother slowly slipping from reality and the grasp of her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), as she gives birth and they move to his rural home town. After night-time feeds she starts to drift towards the woods, where she sees a horse and a motorcycle rider who may or may not be figments of her imagination. Where Legs is about a pile-on of hyper-specific crises, Die My Love is about the general, unacknowledged and difficult to name fury that takes hold of many new mothers.
Christian Dior jacket, $7400, and dress, $110,000.
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello dress, $40,300, and shoes, $3075; stylist’s own stockings.
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y the time the video connects on our Zoom call, Rose Byrne and I are already apologising to each other. Me, because I’ve blurred my background and I don’t want her to think it’s for privacy – who am I to deny Rose Byrne the chance to snoop inside someone’s apartment? (If you’ve seen those Domain ads, you know she’d want to.) It’s to hide the hellscape of a recent move. She, because she’s in the car on her way home to make dinner for her kids after a long day of work. She assures me she’s not the one driving – and it is reassuring, because it’s clear her eyes are not on the road.
“The audience is really only in her perspective and, like her, isn’t sure what’s real and what isn’t”
“When the script came in, I devoured it. Mary lit the page on fire”
Left: Gucci dress, $14,950, and belt, $3350.
A prolific amount of screen work followed her move to New York, where she still lives, including standing behind Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, playing Brad Pitt’s love interest-slash-slave in Troy, appearing with Snoop Dogg in The Tenants, and playing Kirsten Dunst’s closest confidant in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. She also appeared in three thrillers: 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine and Knowing. In 2007, Byrne starred in the legal-thriller series Damages, playing the law school graduate protegee Ellen to Glenn Close’s ruthless lawyer Patty. It ran for five seasons, and in the meantime Byrne asked her agent to start putting her up for comedies: she was in desperate need of a laugh. “Early on in your career, if you’ve had success in one type of character, then immediately you will be asked to play the same type of character again and again,” Byrne says. “It’s the great quest to do something unexpected.”
Louis Vuitton top, $19,300.
Gucci top, $3950, pants, $2000, and belt, $3350.
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Gucci dress, POA, and shoes, $1550.
Food is shown grotesquely up close: glistening and squelching at misophonia-inducing volume in a way that recalls the roast chicken scene in The Substance. During the morning and afternoon school runs, Linda’s daughter, who relies on a feeding tube, whines or laughs in the backseat, with each sound as grating as the other; at night, the feeding machine is consistently beeping; when Linda is alone in the car, her absent husband’s voice screeches over loud speaker, relentlessly demanding updates about the hole in their ceiling, ignoring that his wife is more concerned about the hole in their daughter’s stomach from the tube; everywhere, her phone is constantly vibrating with messages from people who need her. “The sound design is extraordinary,” Byrne says when I tell her I’m still a little rattled (a buzzing phone makes me jump even hours later). “It’s really like a piece of music – this wildly affecting psycho-drama that’s going on is accentuated by what she’s hearing and seeing.”
What drew Byrne to this portrayal of a woman unravelling? “When the script came in, I devoured it,” she says. “Mary lit the page on fire. It’s such a visually rich script.” She gives the example of one scene when bribing her daughter with a pet hamster goes right at first and then quickly very wrong. “The hamster was described as Jack Nicholson in The Shining scratching through the wall; that’s the feeling,” Byrne says. “There was also great humour in the script. Legs is such a tightrope.”
o see Byrne turn herself inside out to capture the jangled nerves and numbed senses of a mother in crisis might come as a surprise to people who’ve grown up thinking of her as a comedic actor. Her petulant pop star Jackie Q in Get Him to the Greek and queen bee Helen in Bridesmaids saw Byrne hold her own with some of Hollywood’s comedy greats. But actually, she turned to comedy at a time in her career when all she was getting were dark, heavy roles, and it was burning her out.
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Now she expertly traverses comedy and drama. In 2021, Byrne starred in the drama series Physical as Sheila, a repressed housewife turned ’80s Jane Fonda-esque aerobics instructor who is battling an eating disorder. It was Byrne’s role as Sheila that caught Bronstein’s attention for Legs: in Byrne she saw an actor who could portray a woman’s twisted relationship with her body, spiralling downwards to the soundtrack of a disturbing inner monologue.
egs is perhaps the most confronting (honest) work in a recent canon of books and films about the suppressed-but-rising scream in the throat that is motherhood. In 2024’s Nightbitch, Amy Adams play an unnamed artist and overwhelmed mother, lost in the domestic grind, who seems to be turning into a feral dog. Like Nightbitch, there’s a surreal, body horror quality to Legs – though Bronstein doesn’t promise the same happy ending.
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ronstein and Byrne took a huge risk in telling a story that expresses the unsayable, the unacceptable, the unthinkable mental track of motherhood. It says out loud the private thoughts that many mothers suppress for fear of appearing to not love their child, especially if they have additional needs. But Legs proves two things can be true: you can desperately love your child and, sometimes, desperately want to flee.
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The escape fantasy also pervades the artist and author Miranda July’s All Fours, a novel about an artist who leaves her husband and child under the guise of going away for two weeks to work. Instead, she makes it as far as a motel 30 minutes down the road and guiltily (and pleasurably) stays there without telling her family where she really is. In The Lost Daughter, Leda also leaves her two young daughters for a time. But where the former is more a reflection on how creativity and desire are not diminished by motherhood, and the latter is about the pull between parenting and career, Legs is about female rage, and how uncomfortable it makes people – other women included.
We are blind to a woman in crisis, even when she’s right in front of us. We want to avert our eyes– made impossible by Bronstein’s camera, which stays tight onto Byrne’s face. Do not look away, she says.
“Mothers are revered, and also invisible at the same time. It’s a weird duality,” Byrne says. “One of my best girlfriends saw Legs the other night and she just said, ‘I feel so seen, I [usually] feel so invisible in my life.’ Legs is an abstract version of [the experience of motherhood], but through that expression she related to it and it was wonderful.
“Until recently, there’s not been much dialogue about motherhood, and especially not from a female perspective with a female director, and so that’s very exciting,” Byrne adds. “I loved Nightbitch, I loved All Fours. We’re now seeing [motherhood] through the vision of female directors and writers, and I’m so excited for that, I’m front row for that. I devour it all. I feel very lucky, I look at my mother’s generation and think, ‘They didn’t have this at all.’ This is an extraordinary time and I’m excited to be alive for it.”
Left: Gucci dress, POA, and shoes, $1550. Right: Gucci coat, POA, bodysuit, $9950, and shoes, $1550.
o prepare for the role of Linda, Byrne and Bronstein spent countless hours at the latter’s house, turning the script over and over. “I was lucky to have this rehearsal period with Mary where we could sit together for about five or six weeks at her kitchen table, three days a week, just going through page by page,” Byrne says. “I’ve never done a film from one character’s perspective, so without that I would have felt untethered.”
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That was followed by an adrenaline-fuelled four weeks of shooting in Montauk on New York’s Long Island. Byrne treated it like a play, an endurance test of acting. It paid off: at the Berlin Film Festival in February, Byrne won the Silver Bear award for best performance; in October, she received a Gotham Awards nomination for Outstanding Lead Performance.
Byrne’s experience of parenthood is far removed from Linda’s. The actor shares two sons, Rocco, nine, and Rafael, eight, with Cannavale, and they take it in turns to parent when the other has a project. Still, she was able to tap into the primal energy that exists within every mother: the anxiety, the fear of your worst nightmare coming true.
Motherhood is also a theme in Platonic, Byrne and Seth Rogan’s series about whether men and women can ever really just be friends. Byrne plays Sylvia, a formerly downtrodden housewife who craves a life outside the home, even though she loves her husband and kids. When she reunites with her best friend from college, mischief ensues, throwing her life wide open. Season two was released just before Legs, and while wildly different in tone (Platonic is inarguably a comedy), both projects address the complications and guilt that arise for women when they feel the pull towards something outside of mothering.
As Byrne pulls up to her house in Brooklyn, we briefly talk about how she balances it all. “I really try to never bring work home, that’s when I’m with my family,” she says. “If I’m by myself [on location], I try to keep space for myself.” Byrne declined an offer to stay in the same beachside motel where they were shooting Legs (“church and state” is her approach to work and life). “That’s not to say you don’t have those nights where you’re lying awake going over the day and the scenes,” she adds. But for tonight, that’s well behind her. All she needs to do now is decide what’s for dinner.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in cinemas November 13; Platonic is on Apple TV now; Fallen Angels opens on Broadway in April.
Left: Gucci dress, POA, and shoes, $1550. Right: Gucci coat, POA, bodysuit, $9950, and shoes, $1550.
y the time the video connects on our Zoom call, Rose Byrne and I are already apologising to each other. Me, because I’ve blurred my background and I don’t want her to think it’s for privacy – who am I to deny Rose Byrne the chance to snoop inside someone’s apartment? (If you’ve seen those Domain ads, you know she’d want to.) It’s to hide the hellscape of a recent move. She, because she’s in the car on her way home to make dinner for her kids after a long day of work. She assures me she’s not the one driving – and it is reassuring, because it’s clear her eyes are not on the road.
o see Byrne turn herself inside out to capture the jangled nerves and numbed senses of a mother in crisis might come as a surprise to people who’ve grown up thinking of her as a comedic actor. Her petulant pop star Jackie Q in Get Him to the Greek and queen bee Helen in Bridesmaids saw Byrne hold her own with some of Hollywood’s comedy greats. But actually, she turned to comedy at a time in her career when all she was getting were dark, heavy roles, and it was burning her out.
egs is perhaps the most confronting (honest) work in a recent canon of books and films about the suppressed-but-rising scream in the throat that is motherhood. In 2024’s Nightbitch, Amy Adams play an unnamed artist and overwhelmed mother, lost in the domestic grind, who seems to be turning into a feral dog. Like Nightbitch, there’s a surreal, body horror quality to Legs – though Bronstein doesn’t promise the same happy ending.
These mothers are nocturnal, coming into their own after dark, because by day they can barely move for the weight of responsibility and dissatisfaction. They’re all losing their grip on reality: is she really turning into a dog? Is the ceiling hole really beckoning her in? Is that motorcyclist really there? Another common factor in these depictions of heterosexual motherhood is an absent father. In Die My Love, Jackson can’t seem to understand the place his wife has gone to in motherhood, nor does he seem interested in trying to. This is true of Nightbitch, where the artist’s husband decides he’ll be the one to go back to work when the couple aren’t happy with their toddler’s daycare. It’s also true of an earlier work about maternal ambivalence, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel of the same name. In it, Leda (played by Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley) tries to balance work with the unending demands of motherhood, while her oblivious husband’s work takes precedence over her own. It’s also true twice over in Legs – Linda’s ship captain husband is literally out to sea, while one of her clients, a young mother played by Danielle Macdonald who appears to be in the depths of post-partum psychosis, has a husband (also a disembodied male voice on speaker phone) who refuses to help: the baby is his wife’s responsibility.
ronstein and Byrne took a huge risk in telling a story that expresses the unsayable, the unacceptable, the unthinkable mental track of motherhood. It says out loud the private thoughts that many mothers suppress for fear of appearing to not love their child, especially if they have additional needs. But Legs proves two things can be true: you can desperately love your child and, sometimes, desperately want to flee.
o prepare for the role of Linda, Byrne and Bronstein spent countless hours at the latter’s house, turning the script over and over. “I was lucky to have this rehearsal period with Mary where we could sit together for about five or six weeks at her kitchen table, three days a week, just going through page by page,” Byrne says. “I’ve never done a film from one character’s perspective, so without that I would have felt untethered.”