Rose Byrne’s Tour de Force in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”

Move over, Uncut Gems: there’s a hot new contender for the title of most stressful movie ever made. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens in a state of permanent anxiety. Beeps pierce the soundtrack. The camera crowds its central character. Mary Bronstein’s film drops the audience not at the precipice of a breakdown but slap bang in the middle of a panic attack, subjecting viewers to the same sensory overload as its protagonist, played with queasy precision by Rose Byrne.

The movie kept this writer awake for two nights. No wonder the experience lingers for the woman at the centre of its maelstrom. “The film is still unravelling for me,” Byrne says. “That’s kind of never happened to me before. That’s why it’s so great to see it with an audience. I keep learning new things about it.”

A Return to Form for Bronstein

It’s a remarkable second feature from Bronstein, the director of the critically acclaimed Yeast, a grungy comedy from 2008 featuring a young Greta Gerwig. Bronstein is too half of this year’s coolest Oscar couple: her husband, Ron Bronstein, is one of the writers of the Academy Award-nominated Marty Supreme.

Byrne is a fan. “The screenplay was incendiary,” the Australian powerhouse says of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. “The film really defies genre. It is extraordinary what you see on the screen: beautiful, with Lynchian ideas, the existential themes she’s toying with, the horror tropes, and the comedy set pieces. The hamster in the film is described like Jack Nicholson from The Shining banging through the wall. It has purely dramatic sequences and comedy set pieces. It was a script of reveals.”

Award-Winning Performance

Byrne’s Oscar-nominated turn justifiably makes her Jessie Buckley’s nearest rival in the best-actress category. Both stars took home awards from the Golden Globes, Buckley for best actress in a drama, and Byrne for best actress in a musical or comedy. As reported by Wikipedia, Byrne also won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Performance.

“I was so emotional about winning the Silver Bear,” Byrne says. “I honestly couldn’t believe it. I’m not incredibly well versed in that world – it’s not really my wheelhouse – so I felt very speechless when it happened.”

In fact, Byrne has form. A full 25 years ago she won the Volpi Cup for best actress at Venice International Film Festival, for her role in Clara Law’s Aussie drama The Goddess of 1967.

A Career Spanning Decades

Unsurprisingly, Byrne was marked down as a very early contender for the best-actress Oscar. She edged out Buckley at the New York Film Critics Circle, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, delivering funny, unpretentious speeches all the way. At the Golden Globes she was down to earth in characteristically Australian fashion. “Thanks to my mum and dad, who bought Paramount+ so they could watch the Golden Globes from Sydney,” she said. “And I’d like to thank my husband, Bobby Cannavale, who couldn’t be here as we are getting a bearded dragon, and he went to a reptile expo in New Jersey.”

She certainly deserves a dragon. She exercises every acting muscle as Linda, a therapist and mother who is barely holding her life together. The intersection between existential dread and frantic school runs has never been so carefully articulated.

“Mary has been saying to audiences, sometimes beforehand, ‘Think about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in your life, like your worst trauma,’” Byrne says of Bronstein. “And then think about the worst thing that’s happened to you today. That could be you stubbing your toe or spilling your coffee. That’s where this movie exists. It’s the school run and work and all of that.”

A Stellar Ensemble Cast

Shot in just under a month, the production demanded constant emotional escalation. That pressure compelled an impeccable ensemble cast – including ASAP Rocky, Christian Slater and a revelatory Conan O’Brien – to connect with method-acting energies.

“My adrenaline was so high doing the film,” Byrne says. “It was very quick and it was a high-wire act, just finding the comedy, finding the nuance, finding the horror. Both horror and comedy are all about timing. I was constantly working with Mary to make sure the character wasn’t one note – or just hysterical – because she starts deep, deep, deep in the crisis.”

The character’s unspooling had to remain intelligible even as it intensified. Linda’s daughter’s name is never revealed, and her face isn’t shown until the final scene. The ceiling of the family’s home collapses, leaving a gushing and mysterious hole that necessitates relocation to a hotel, where Linda becomes increasingly dependent on wine. There’s even a runaway hamster.

Drawing on her own home life helped. She and Cannavale have been together since 2012 – she calls him her husband, but “we just haven’t gone to the courthouse yet”, she told the Washington Post a few months ago – and Byrne has been juggling acting with motherhood since 2016.

“The movie is the character,” she says. “I’m pretty grounded. I have two small kids, and they’re very grounding. Taking care of them after a long day helps. But it was disorienting, to say the least, when we finished this movie. It was weirdly shocking. Like a car crash.”

Few actors could pull off the demands of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. But few actors could match Byrne’s effortless swerves from Hollywood franchises – Peter Rabbit, Star Wars: Insidious – to the forensic legal thrills of the TV series Damages and, on stage, the heavy lifting of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Euripides’ Medea.

Born and raised in Sydney, Byrne landed her first professional roles in her teens. “I fell into it at a really young age, doing classes, and just really loved it,” she says. “And I wasn’t sure how to do it as a job. Even when that happened, I definitely went through a period of, Did I just desire to do this because I started when I was young, or do I want to do this because I love it?”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in cinemas from Friday, February 20th.