With fashion month now behind us, this Thursday’s episode of The Run-Through goes deep on one of the buzziest movies at Sundance this year: Mary Bronstein’s absorbing psychological com-dram If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring the wonderful Rose Byrne.
Ahead of the film’s release in theaters on Friday, Rose stopped by the podcast studio to chat with Chloe Malle and Taylor Antrim about its major themes (among them, the mania of motherhood and caretaking); unpack some of its most breathtaking sequences (that ending!); and dork out over her co-stars, A$AP Rocky and Conan O’Brien.
Read a slightly edited and condensed version of that conversation here—and then cue up the full episode to hear the group discuss Rose’s partner Bobby Cannavale’s latest turn on Broadway, in Yasmina Reza’s Art; Rose’s own forthcoming appearance onstage in Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, opposite Kelli O’Hara; the hardest skills she’s had to learn for a role (one of them was to play…Gloria Steinem?); and how she and her stylist Kate Young build her red-carpet looks. You won’t want to miss a minute of it.
Chloe Malle: Okay. I want to talk about Legs because unfortunately, Taylor and I have very different tastes in film. He likes a really stressful film…
Taylor Antrim: I do. Well, I love feeling like your heart’s racing a little bit—
CM: It’s like being on a rollercoaster for two hours.
TA: But I enjoy that.
CM: I find that… difficult.
Rose Byrne: There’s a claustrophobia. I don’t disagree. The film asks a lot of its audience and it’s an experience. It is kind of radical and a little punk rock, and it definitely has a claustrophobia to it and a tone that is a pressure cooker underneath, but it is released with comedy. I think there are these moments where the valves release and you are allowed to laugh at the absurdity.
CM: And heart! There are these moments of real empathy and you do respond to that.
TA: So your character’s daughter has a kind of eating disorder and is connected to a feeding tube. And the challenge that your character is facing is that this doctor, played by Mary Bronstein, is saying that your daughter has to gain something like 50 pounds this week or there’s a further intervention that’s going to happen.
CM: And the doctor character is really expressing some quite tacit, and not, judgment of Rose’s character in the way that she’s handling it.
TA: The film is really about this need to escape from reality… the camera’s on your face the whole time. Linda is the main character, but there’s very little objectivity from her. It’s like you’re just kind of in her brain.
RB: It’s purely her point of view the entire time. Yes.
TA: But my question is, when you got the script, what did you think?
RB: I mean, the script was just fire. I don’t know how to describe, but it was electric and read like a fever dream. And it’s existential and it’s about motherhood and it’s about being a caretaker and about therapy and there’s many layers. And I felt simultaneously terrified and adrenalized by the whole thing. I just thought it was quite extraordinary and I feel like the film very much reflects the script. Often a screenplay can be one thing and a film can really evolve into something else. But this was, it’s very true to what I read. What was on the page is really what you see on the screen.
CM: But I did finish the film wondering how draining it was to make the film. Because I needed to take a bath.
RB: Yeah, your nerves are jangled for sure. I agree. When we shot it my adrenaline was so high because of the pace we were at. The film is ambitious. It’s ambitious with its sequences… it was all done practically. There’s very little special effects. And it was not a big budget. We shot it in 26 or 27 days.
TA: In Montauk?
RB: In Montauk and around the city. But my adrenaline was so high, it was really not until after….it was a bit like doing a play. You sort of step on stage and then I had a little bit forgotten what happened in between the start and the finish. And then at the end I felt a little bereft. I think I felt… it has stayed with me and I felt a lot of separation anxiety from Mary Bronstein, the writer/director.
TA: She’s so good in the movie too.
RB: Isn’t she great? She’s so humorless. She’s this doctor who’s just the nemesis of Linda.
TA: In some ways she’s an audience surrogate because the audience sort of wants your character to bear down and make that appointment…
RB: Absolutely.
TA: And I thought that was interesting that she played that sort of role in the film.
RB: It’s so true.
TA: A lot of people feel like they haven’t seen you in a role like this before. There was the show Physical, which is a much darker kind of comedy than maybe we’re used to with you, and had elements of drama. This movie has some elements of humor, but make no mistake, this is a very serious film.
CM: This is not Bridesmaids to anyone listening who’s a fan. Be warned.
TA: Do these categories matter to you when you look at the script? Do you think to yourself, This is my way out of doing the kinds of things that people expect of me? Or is it something that you don’t even think of in that way?
RB: I mean I just thought of it as, what an opportunity. Like, oh God, I don’t want to mess this up, A), but to your point about genre, we did Telluride Film Festival recently and we did a panel on genre with Jodie Foster, myself and Mary Bronstein, and this wonderful French director, Rebecca Zlotowski. We were discussing genre and what its constraints are, what its freedoms are, and its sort of thing. And I feel like with Mary’s film, to that point, sort of defies it in a way, because there’s many different genres in the film. And for me as a creative, I love to explore all of them. In terms of comedy and drama, the best drama is funny and the best comedy is dramatic. And I think, not to be too corny, but they kind of come from the same wellspring, the same place. And that tightrope is what I love to watch and what I attempt to do, for want of a better explanation. And this film was such an opportunity to have both of those. And it is of course very dramatic and it is not in the genre of a Bridesmaids or a Spy or a Neighbors or Platonic or something, which is far broader and more of a hang comedy.
CM: But it’s a gymnastics routine. I mean, you were doing everything.
RB: Yeah, but again, so fulfilling creatively. Really a creative highlight for me of my career, for sure.
TA: Tell Rose how old your kids are.
CM: Well, yes. My daughter’s three and every morning I feel like I’m going through battle.
RB: The cortisol levels are high.
TA: That’s very much what this movie is.
CM: I know, and I really related to that. I mean I had a moment this weekend where she refused to eat and I just had to walk away. I feel like I’ve been very grateful over the past five years—even more—that women are finally talking very honestly about the complexity of motherhood, and that even in the last two years that has ramped up to become even more intense. I wonder, were there any texts or films that you went to that helped fill out this character?
RB: Well, Mary Bronstein, the writer/director, is very candid about this. This is a pretty personal experience that she went through being a parent. So Mary was always my touchstone for the character and for the story. And I love this dialogue that is finally happening. I feel like with motherhood there’s so much shame around having feelings that are maybe anger, disappointment, frustration, challenges, claustrophobia, postpartum… all these things that for many years there was no dialogue around or language or anything. And it’s hard. It’s challenging for people to watch.
Mothers are both revered and also dismissed, I think, in society. It’s obviously the most important job in the world, but yet it has so many shortcomings and lack of support and lack of, we could go on and on about that. But this artistic conversation around it I think is really inspiring and Mary doesn’t pull any punches. It is very much about that, and the terrible choices my character makes about being a mother, and the denial she is in. The truth is, she can’t even see her child. She is, at that point, a caretaker more than a mother, and she’s not having the typical experience of much joy with her child. And there are moments of that throughout the film, and what she’s going through as a mother is, like, 99% of mothers will hopefully not go through this. It is such a specific thing. But that idea of being a caretaker, I think, is something people can relate to in many different aspects of their life.
CM: What you’re saying is exactly right and I try to sort of remind myself of that: remembering to find the joy. And I thought that what Mary did so well was that you literally don’t see your child in the film until the last frame. You are quite literally inside your head.
RB: Which is what she wanted. It was a wild conceit. When she pitched it to me, I was like, oh, okay. But obviously I saw the child. She was my scene partner and all of my choices are informed by Delaney Quinn, this wonderful actress who… we met with a lot of great young actresses and Delaney ended up doing the part and she was just brilliant. And it was also great having a child on set because it brings a levity. There’s a sense of play that you just have to bring when you have a child on set, and that was really a gift.
CM: How old is Delaney?
RB: At the time she was 10. She’s probably 12 now. But she was a terrific kid and loves horror films. We would just talk about what you talk about with kids. She was gorgeous.
TA: I wonder if COVID plays a role here, because all of us who were parenting through COVID had a pretty unique experience….
CM: You were in a dark place.
RB: How old are your children?
TA: My son’s just about to turn 11 and my daughter’s 13, so I’m a little ahead of where you are, I know, with your two boys...
RB: Yeah, so I have seven and nine. I have a stepson who’s 30, so we have the whole gamut.
CM: But you had the toughest time for COVID. I always think that the age my kids are now would be brutal.
RB: I know what you mean. It’s definitely, gosh, it was challenging, and I did two quarantines in Australia, where you didn’t leave the hotel. It was very strict and I did that twice with my kids for two weeks. Which was just a little bit sad by the end.
CM: Well, I was going to ask if there was any moment of parenting claustrophobia or frustration that you could pull on that you went back to, but maybe it was being quarantined for two weeks in Australia?
RB: My sense memory of quarantine was the… I mean, I love all the phone calls. Those phone calls you have with your partner sometimes about the children…
CM: That really hit home for me.
RB: I find phone calls quite hard to perform, to make them sound authentic. Mary was so brilliant with making that all really, really specific and very practical, and [Christian Slater] would always be in some strange location trying to call in.
TA: I do want to ask about the last sequence, which I guess is a minor spoiler, but not really. I don’t know how to handle this on a podcast… skip ahead or something. But at the end, you’re on the beach and you sort of plunge into the waves over and over again and I feel like I’d almost never seen anything like that before.
CM: I shivered.
TA: It was sort of scary to watch. Can you tell me about that?
RB: Honestly, it was such a huge sequence. The entire sort of schedule, to be honest, was kind of around the beach, because we had to get it all shot before it got too cold out in Montauk. It was a Tetris of trying to figure all of that stuff out, and so we managed to just get in there right at the end of summer, when everything was closing up and the water was still warm enough that we were going to be able to execute this really ambitious sequence. I’m Australian, I grew up in Sydney, and you learn to swim very, very young. Eighty percent of the population is on the coast, so you’re in the water as soon as you can walk. It’s very much part of my culture, so I have a great respect for the ocean. I take it very seriously. I’m aware of the waves and the currents and all those sorts of things. I don’t take that lightly, and Montauk can be really rough. Leading up to that, the waves had been very quiet, and then on the night they all of a sudden came rolling in. And there was a sense that all of us were in this together, trying to make this work. We nearly lost our cinematographer. We obviously had all of the safety precautions in place, but it was definitely ambitious.
CM: Was there any part of playing this character that you felt shifted your perspective on motherhood or even just reminded you of how unrealistic the expectations of motherhood can be?
RB: Every part of the film did, I mean, Mary sharing her story with me, we spoke to a lot of mothers of children with special needs, and that was really, as you can imagine, very heavy and very moving. These women sharing these stories of their kids and what they’ve been through at various ages… they were so wonderful and candid with me, and that has stayed with me and will continue to stay with me. But on every level this film has changed my perspective on motherhood in many ways.
CM: What are your calls with Bobby that are like the Christian Slater calls?
RB: It’s, like, schedule and groceries. Schedule and groceries. It’s like a constant thing. I don’t know if you guys have the same experience…
TA: I do the groceries and the schedule. I’m the CEO. But Liz is more fun.
CM: That’s what I say. Graham does everything, but I’m more fun.
RB: Oh, people come for Bobby and they stay for Bobby. He’s definitely more fun. He delivers and he does the groceries.
CM: Oh, we love [A$AP] Rocky so much.
TA: That was such a fun cover story.
CM: I mean, he really charmed everyone on our team at the Met. Everyone was just putty in his hands.
RB: I feel like it’s the same experience for everybody. It’s definitely mine as well.
CM: Was this his first film?
RB: No, he had done a few other small roles, I believe, but he was just so generous and curious and it was a hard character to play. He’s truly the only character with empathy in the film, and curiosity, and who actually sees what’s happening in front of him.
TA: He’s sort of a breath of fresh air. He keeps the audience engaged, I think, and sort of rooting for my character. He’s very instrumental in the narrative. It’s a hard needle to thread and he did it really beautifully. And Mary Bronstein just knew it had to be him. She’s very ingenious with her casting—I mean, same with Conan O’Brien playing my therapist.
CM: That’s bold, being like, “I have to have Conan and Rocky.”
RB: It is, it’s punk rock.
