It was the first day of June, and Rose Byrne, the Australian actress, had a voluminous houndstooth scarf wrapped around her neck. “It’s not New York winter, but it’s actually quite cold here,” she said, speaking over Zoom. “I had to go to Uniqlo and buy a big puffer.” (In her mellifluous accent, the word sounded more like “puffah.”) Byrne, who is usually based in Brooklyn, was in Sydney, where she grew up, and where she had arrived some weeks earlier, along with her partner, the American actor Bobby Cannavale, and the couple’s two young boys. They had spent a fortnight observing Australia’s ultra-strict quarantine edicts. (“Hotel, police, the whole thing. That’s why Australia has been so incredibly successful in dealing with COVID,” Byrne said.) She had just done “preschool drop-off and all that jazz” and was walking over to the Sydney Theatre Company, where she had made her stage début, at twenty, and where, last year, she and Cannavale were supposed to star together in Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” until that plan was scuttled by the pandemic.
Apart from the scarf, Byrne, who is forty-one, was wearing a big gray sweater, with her hair in a ponytail and a pair of sunglasses perched on her head. In movies like “Bridesmaids,” TV shows like “Damages,” and plays like “Medea” (in which she acted opposite Cannavale), she is known for her almost intimidating good looks, but her manner is relatably frazzled, and she prefers to blend in. “Bobby is so striking-looking,” she said. “He can’t escape people’s attention. He’s tall, and he has this voice. I can sort of disappear more easily, but it’s hard to hide Bobby.” She gave a raucous laugh.
Byrne stood outside the theatre, on the Sydney Harbour wharf. The top of the Harbour Bridge gleamed in the distance, above the serene blue waters of the bay. She walked in and up the stairs, admiring some recent refurbishments, and inspected a row of posters advertising the season’s productions. “Ooh, they’re doing ‘The Lifespan of a Fact’! Bobby did it in New York, with Cherry Jones and Dan Radcliffe.” Ducking in line at the theatre’s café (“I have to put in my QR code, for contact tracing, otherwise I’ll get in trouble”), she ordered a flat white with oat milk.
Byrne is starring in “Physical,” a new dark comedy on Apple TV+, in which she plays Sheila, a troubled San Diego housewife who becomes a spandex-sporting aerobics guru amid the transition from the touchy-feely seventies to the every-woman-for-herself eighties. “In a way, it’s kind of a companion piece to ‘Mrs. America,’ ” she said, referring to last year’s historical miniseries on FX about American second-wave feminism, in which she played Gloria Steinem. (She is planning to play another political figure, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, in a film about the Christchurch mosque attacks.) “Sheila is very disillusioned with the movement. Her marriage is liberal on the surface, but in fact she’s incredibly unhappy. And she has this entrepreneurial, industrious spirit.” Byrne went on, “The eighties were really the beginning of the age of the influencer that we’re living in now, and that self-belief is so American. Sometimes I walk around America and I’m, like, ‘How did I get here?’ I still feel very Australian in that way.”
As far as exercise goes, Byrne, in her day-to-day life, tends to prefer a spot of Iyengar yoga to the exertions of aerobics. Her role in “Physical,” however, clued her in to the attractions of a higher-intensity, dance-based workout. “The show is not not funny about aerobics. The outfits are hilarious, and we were always laughing on set, but it’s also a huge part of Sheila’s story,” she said. “The way people described it, it was like a cult, an addiction.” She took a sip of coffee. “For the show, I did Zoom sessions with this amazing choreographer, Jennifer Hamilton, and I slowly started getting better, and I could see the addictive qualities of it, the adrenaline, even when you’re at your most tired. The thing about me is”—she lowered her voice—“I’m a little bit lazy. I like to just hang out. I’m a Leo, and people are always, like, ‘Are you sure? You? A Leo?’ ”
Through the café’s floor-to-ceiling windows, a stunning view of the bay was visible. She pointed to a peninsula across the harbor: “I used to take the ferry to high school every morning from there, from Balmain, where I grew up. They would give out free toast.” She sank into a reverie. “It was so good. This thick white bread with butter and Vegemite! Me with the toast on the ferry. A very relaxing way to start the day.” ♦
