How Rose Byrne kicked the screen till it bleeds daylight in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

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Rose Byrne possesses a singular kind of gravitational pull.

While the Australian actress has never quite been the centre of her many big-screen projects (Bridesmaids was Kristen Wiig’s show to steal, while the Neighbors films were Seth Rogen’s) and her television series have relied on her ability to bounce off the energy of her higher-profile co-stars (Glenn Close in Damages, Rogen again in Platonic), Byrne has always been a remarkably magnetic presence all the same.

But with the new, deeply dark dramedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the actress finally gets to be the singular focus – literally.

Byrne plays Linda, a therapist who must navigate a series of nerve-shredding crises that metastasize every few minutes. Her young daughter has a severe eating disorder, her husband is often out of town for work and her house’s ceiling has just caved in thanks to a burst pipe. To raise the anxiety-stewing ante, writer-director Mary Bronstein (following up her 2008 debut Yeast) films Byrne almost entirely in a series of sustained and extreme close-ups, ensuring that Byrne’s face is not only in the centre of the frame but often filling the entirety of it. (Even when, for example, Linda must deal with the unexpected terror of a new pet hamster.)

Film review: Rose Byrne’s raw intensity in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You will send you into the best kind of hysterics

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For any other actress, such a gambit might be too big of an aesthetic bet. But Byrne anchors the entire experience with a raw power that feels as meticulously designed as it does organic.

While at the Toronto International Film Festival last month for the film’s Canadian premiere, Byrne sat down with The Globe and Mail to talk about delivering the performance of the year.

Mary trains her camera on you in a unique way: Your face is, in many ways, the face of this film. Does that place a heavy weight on you as a performer?

This is a movie truly from this character’s perspective – there’s no light coming from elsewhere, and that means you don’t know what’s real or not at certain times. Even as a viewer, when I saw it, it plays with existential feelings and Mary is not shying away from that, and offering audiences more questions than answers. It’s confrontational and it’s an experience. And I’m drawn to that sort of material, almost Lynchian. But mostly, it’s all a testament to Mary’s directing.

It’s confrontational but with such a pressure-cooker kind of intensity, too. Was it as intense a process to shoot as it is to watch?

It was 27 days and the adrenalin was high – I just didn’t want to screw it up. But Mary and I had over a month together of figuring it out before, just the two of us sitting at her kitchen table, going through every single piece of dialogue, every punctuation. It was this gorgeous period where we could talk and share stories. And it’s a very personal story to Mary – the experience that she had with her own daughter. Without that, it would have been untethered. It was also a tenuous time, around the strike period, and we weren’t sure when or if we could go on. Once we were on set, we could communicate very quickly, which is key when you’re troubleshooting.

Would you call that month-long process beforehand “rehearsal” or “research” or something altogether different?

Absolutely both. I was obsessed with this character. Who was she before this crisis? The audience isn’t explained anything – they’re not given morsels of her past. So I needed to know exactly where she comes from, how she might act on a “normal” day, so I can build from that. There was a lot for me to sink my teeth into. To understand every beat as we went along, I needed that. And Mary was so candid about her own experiences, too. She was the touchstone for my performance.

There is a great moment early in the film where – and I’m going to give a mild spoiler warning to my readers here – we find out after all the stress Linda has experienced over the first 20 minutes, she’s in fact a therapist. And she has her own therapist, a real jerk played by Conan O’Brien, in a genuinely subversive bit of casting.

Oh, I was delighted and so surprised by him, too. Mary has great intuition when it comes to casting – she’s punk rock. And that was the perfect example of her being able to execute an unconventional idea and deliver. He brings such goodwill with him – who doesn’t love Conan? – so to have that bait and switch is wonderful.

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In interviews, Mary has said she was drawn to you for this role because she’d thought that you have always been “hiding in plain sight.”

It’s hard to speak of one’s own profile, outside of my day-to-day life. But again, she cast Conan and [A$AP] Rocky and I feel like I’m in the same category: a perhaps unexpected choice, one that could have gone many different ways.

Did she ever talk to you about your work on Apple TV’s Physical? I feel like your character there, Sheila, has a lot of similar qualities to Linda. Both are on the verge of something monumental, facing all these external stressors. I wish more people saw that show, of course ...

Mary loved the show, and she got it as well. That show was pretty polarizing, in many ways. But I’m so proud of the work we did on that. And Mary could see the elements, I’m sure, of what it might be like for Linda in that world. Physical is obviously a very different work, but there’s a tone on that show that Mary responded to.

That tenuous balance between comedy and dark drama, it’s there in both projects – and I feel it all depends on your ability to balance both.

Well that’s Mary, because the tension in this film is very tight and uncomfortable. “Claustrophobic” is the word people keep using. But then she releases the valve, and the gas comes out and you’re going to get this relief of being able to laugh. And that’s such a hard thing to achieve.

Once shooting wrapped, did you find that you had your own kind of pressure-valve relief moment?

I did feel the adrenalin of driving this through, so it felt like coming off stage after you’ve done a play. It’s that similar feeling in your body – almost a bereftness, this grief for this role and character. But I also have two little kids who were 5 and 7 at the time, and they couldn’t care less if I had a long day or anything. That’s the greatest equalizer.

I have to ask: Have your kids asked you for a pet hamster yet?

[Laughs] No, but one of my sons really wants a chameleon.

Just doing some dime-store movie-junket analysis here, maybe his interest speaks to his parents’ profession. [Byrne’s husband is actor Bobby Cannavale.]

Maybe? Maybe! But they do just love animals. When we went to Berlin and I won the Silver Bear award, they were very cute about that. They wanted to hold the bear. But then they forgot about it.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens in select theatres Oct. 17 before expanding Oct. 24.

This interview has been condensed and edited.