Rose Byrne Is Brilliant As an Unravelling Mum in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

In between takes for Mary Bronstein’s vertiginous, adrenaline-pumped portrait of a mother in freefall, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, its lead Rose Byrne would burst out laughing. “It was that sense of relief you have when you’re filming such heavy material,” she says when we meet in a London hotel on the eve of the Baftas. She has rightly become a frontrunner in the awards race for her unstoppable tornado of a performance.

The cinematic equivalent of a panic attack, but in the best way possible, Mary Bronstein’s film stars the Bridesmaids and Marie Antoinette actor as Linda, a therapist who has been left to singlehandedly care for her daughter, who has a mysterious feeding disorder requiring 24-hour attention. To make matters worse, the ceiling of her Montauk apartment caves in, forcing her and her daughter to decamp to a scuzzy motel.

“The set [dynamic] was actually very light,” insists Byrne, explaining that the atmosphere was buoyed by her ten-year-old onscreen daughter, Delaney Quinn. In a striking visual choice, Quinn is kept just off-camera throughout, forcing us to empathise solely with the frazzled mother while revealing just how self-centred her universe has become. Cinematographer Christopher Messina’s camera was held mere inches from Byrne’s face. “It really technically stretched me,” adds the Australian actor. “I've never had this challenge before in a feature film.” However, Byrne says his skill enabled her to feel “completely free”.

Linda is at the vortex of a whirlpool of subplots and characters, among them her own therapist (and colleague), a brilliantly indifferent, deadpan Conan O’Brien. There is also Linda’s client, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), who is on the brink of her own meltdown. Then there is the charming motel superintendent, James (A$AP Rocky), who tries to offer Linda a life raft but is ruthlessly cut off. On her anti-chemistry with him, Byrne says: “Rocky has such a quality you can’t direct. He offers a respite for the audience, because my character is full of such hostility. [You hope] maybe she will find some happiness for five minutes. The audience is craving it.

“I’ve had people in my life going through incredibly hard times or traumas who have slowly cut people off because they don’t want any reflection of their behaviour or their situation on them, when people know that they shouldn’t be in that situation.”

Bronstein, who first catapulted on to the film scene in 2008 with her self-starring, Greta Gerwig-headlined feature debut Yeast – a mumblecore classic – also appears as an unimpressed doctor, putting pressure on Linda to help her daughter lose weight. Drawn directly from Bronstein’s own experiences of going through lengthy treatments for her sick daughter, the script swivels between inky black comedy, horror and a less tangible, untethered, Lynchian surrealism, plundering the strange recesses of this mother’s fraying mind.

“It was unnerving,” says Byrne of acting alongside the writer-director. “She’s so stern, and also we’re the same age, but Mary looks like she’s 17. She’s just this unbelievably youthful-looking, beautiful woman. It’s that thing of when someone younger than you is the authority and that weird tension it creates. The relationship with doctors is extremely complex. Mary spoke to me a lot about [...] how much you rely on them, but how much you have anger, too, because these doctors get to go home […] and have their lives.”

Both onscreen and off, If I Had Legs was an overwhelming experience. Bronstein was determined to execute ambitious set pieces organically, without CGI. In the film’s most memorable scene, involving an aggressive hamster Linda buys compared in Bronstein’s script to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a real rodent was filmed alongside a puppet version – each requiring their own teams of wranglers and puppeteers. A high level of detail and planning on the part of the hair and make-up teams also went into finessing Linda’s descent. “There were charts everywhere tracking exactly her timeline and all of her excessive drinking and smoking,” says Byrne.

A decade after co-founding the feminist production company Dollhouse Collective, Byrne (who played the iconic feminist Gloria Steinem in the hit series Mrs America) has been pivoting towards female-led stories. As such, she felt naturally drawn to this no-holds-barred film exploding entrenched ideas of selflessness around motherhood. “It feels like there is a push in the industry to have more female lenses on these stories, but there’s still a long way to go, and it’s been fascinating to see Mary's experience unfold with this and how people have received it.

“Steinem used to pitch that women should be getting paid for [childcare and housework] by the government. Mothers are both revered and ignored [...] I have another friend who saw the film who had a really hard time with it. She’s a parent and said, ‘I was very confronted with my own feelings about parenthood, because motherhood is suffering, that’s what you sign up for. Why is [Linda] complaining, because that’s what it is?’”

While Byrne – who has two sons – can’t say she relates to the more chaotic parts of Linda’s personality, she does think there is something universal in the “relentlessness of parenting”. “It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done, but there’s also a grief to it. You’re never going to be that same person again. It’s a different chapter of your life.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is out in UK cinemas now.