Rose Byrne’s career path seemed obvious. The Australian actress first became familiar to most Americans in Damages, the tense and twisty cable series that debuted in 2007. Byrne played a lawyer terrorized by Glenn Close’s Patty Hewes, and after two Emmy nominations and two Golden Globe nominations, she seemed ready to move into the obvious echelon: that of the dramatic actress who regularly appears in grim Oscar bait and moody indie-house fare.
But a funny thing happened on her way out of the cable-television neighborhood: Byrne became an unlikely comedic star. In the past decade, she’s stolen scenes in huge comedies, including Get Him to the Greek, Bridesmaids, Spy, and both Neighbors films. Next year she will star alongside 2017’s comedic breakout, Tiffany Haddish, in a buddy comedy directed by Miguel Arteta. (“It’s a really great script, something I hadn’t really read before for a long time.”)
Over tea in a Boerum Hill café, Byrne recently explained that she did make something of a conscious decision to start looking for comedic roles, when she was wrapping up Damages. “Firstly, I think they come from the same place, comedy and drama,” she said. She remembered studying drama as a young student, then discovering she had a comedic impulse scratching at the surface: “I realized, Hold on, I don't want to be taken that seriously anymore. I want to be able to be taken seriously doing something funny. It was a good turning point. And I think it freed me up more. Hopefully. I think comedy informs your drama and drama informs your comedy.”
After the heaviness of Damages, Byrne was eager to look for something lighter. “I had done a supporting role in Marie Antoinette, Sofia [Coppola]’s movie, and that character was very, kind of bubbly—and the comedic relief a little bit. It was a very small part, that gave me a taste. It was like, I want to try to see if I could do a little more of this,” she said. Then came 2010's Get Him to the Greek, which firmly set Byrne on a new trajectory.
The actress was frank about the level of control she has over her career—how much of it has come down to chance, the scripts she’s received and the ones she hasn’t. “[There were some] dramatic roles that didn’t come to me. I was like, ‘That’s a shame, I would’ve loved to do that.” she said. “It’s definitely a little bit out of your hands. It’s really out of your hands, is the truth.”
Byrne’s latest film, Juliet, Naked, feels like a bit of a landmark for her. After numerous supporting roles, this one—which sits somewhere between the comedic and dramatic poles—is centered firmly on her character: Annie, who is stuck in a stagnant relationship with a man played by Byrne’s Bridesmaids co-star Chris O’Dowd, when she improbably connects with an aging former rock star, played by Ethan Hawke. The film, based on a novel by Nick Hornby, has a sweetness and warmth that is enhanced by its casting—who wouldn’t want to get a beer with Byrne, O’Dowd, and Hawke?
Byrne was interested in playing the part as soon as she read the book, and reached out to director Jesse Peretz and producer Judd Apatow about it. “It was still sort of in script development for a long time, and then it slowly came together and then they reached out again and I was like, ‘Yes! Yeah, I’m in. I’m all in.’ And then it came together in 2017 and we went to London and we shot it for a couple of months,” she said.
Hawke is a good friend of Byrne’s partner, Bobby Cannavale; they starred together in the 2005 Off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly. Byrne describes him as “charismatic, very smart . . . he’s all-in in every scene.” She also has a personal connection with O’Dowd that goes beyond Bridesmaids: “He’s worked in Australia with some friends of mine. . . . He’s Irish, I’m Australian, there’s a shorthand, a cultural shorthand. Chris just felt incredibly familiar to me. It was very easy.”
She said it was easy for her to access the crux of Annie’s struggle, as the character yearns to get more from life. “Though it wasn’t a relationship that I’ve been in, I have seen people who've been together forever and then seem to get stuck for whatever reason and then they kind of try to get out before it’s too late . . . but sometimes it is too late,” she said. “She’s sort of breaking all the rules. She’s set up this life, she’s set up this thing, and all of a sudden she’s literally like, What am I doing. And she is so uncomfortable with it, so apologetic, and very English, but it’s funny. I thought that it was an examination of a woman who’s 40. She’s not 25, she’s not 35, she's 40.”
Bridesmaids wasn’t just the film that introduced a global audience to Rose Byrne, comedian; it was heralded as a female-centric success story, a vanguard that inspired everything from Trainwreck to Girls Trip. This wasn’t something Byrne fully had a grasp on at the time.
“I was very naïve, and I didn’t know, ‘Wow, this is groundbreaking,’ or ‘This is going to change the game,’ or . . . I was so naïve, and when we went to do the press, and it became such a beloved movie, I was like, ‘Oh, this is all we’re going to be talking about.’ And I was very unprepared for that,” she said. “It was definitely fun doing it, and unusual because it was all women. . . . I had never done anything like that with that many actresses.”
Now, in this post–Harvey Weinstein Hollywood, Byrne is looking at her choices differently. “I think the past few years have been so incredible in what’s been revealed, and I think it can’t not affect everyone in the business. . . . I’m incredibly lucky in that I haven’t been in situations where I felt—not really, maybe here and there—where I felt, like, uncomfortable. I’ve never had a horrible trauma. These incredible women who come out and talk about it, which is really hard, I think it’s incredible for anybody to come forward.”
Byrne has a production company—Dollhouse—which she runs with four of her female friends, and which is focused on female-driven projects. And she said that she has noticed, industry-wide, an uptick in the number of women who are attached to projects as directors or producers: “That’s a big shift that I’ve seen from my side of things. So I just hope it continues, and continues, and continues to change and evolve, so it can become a point where we don’t have to talk about it all the time—because it’s just a given that there’s equal rights for women.”
Cannavale and Byrne have shared the screen together in the past, in 2014’s Annie and Adult Beginners, as well as Spy; Cannavale, Jersey-born and of Italian descent, made his career with a diverse range of television and film projects after breaking through with his role on Third Watch, and he’s also mixed in a wide array of stage work, with two Tony nominations (for 2007’s Mauritius and 2011’s The Motherfucker in the Hat). Byrne says the two value each other as collaborators.
“He gets me as an actress and I think I get him as an actor,” she said. “Because we’re very different, and come from such different worlds, but that is a huge common ground, our work. He’s very down to earth as well, I think. He’s very smart with material, he has a lot of ideas. Whereas I can get a little flustered, he’s very fluid with his ideas about stuff which for me is very helpful.”
The two recently filmed an appearance together on Rashida Jones’s TBS comedy series Angie Tribeca. “It’s very funny, physical comedy and, yeah, we were just laughing, and laughing. I had just had the baby so I was really out of it, but it was great,” she said. Byrne—who also recently filmed a spot on Amy Sedaris’s show—can see herself returning to television at some point: “Yeah. Oh, for sure. Again, it’s what comes my way.”
On our way out of the café, bracing against the humidity, we chatted briefly about podcasts, which Byrne said she listens to with much more frequency when she is in Los Angeles. In Brooklyn, though, “I don't like walking and listening to podcasts for some reason. I’d rather just take in the. . . .” She gestured to the Brooklyn cars and Brooklyn trees and sunshine and passersby. “Yeah. I like quiet.”
