Rose Byrne on Her ‘Punk-Rock’ New Film, ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

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.