Rose Byrne on bringing rage and humor to If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
When Rose Byrne speaks about If I Had Legs I'd Kick You she keeps returning to a single idea: the movie is not a plot so much as a feeling. Byrne describes the film as “really a feeling,” one that “lives in that space” between the quotidian embarrassments of life and an accumulation of small cruelties that become nearly unbearable.
Directed with a singular vision by Mary Bronsteinn the film threads together disparate tones, comic, heartbreakingly honest, and at times almost surreal without sacrificing emotional truth. Byrne admits the tonal shifts were part of the appeal, it doesn’t tell you what to feel so much as invite you into someone’s interior world and let the emotional logic of that world unfold.
Byrne’s character, Linda, is a study in contradictions: a caretaker and a woman who is constantly overlooked. Byrne points to the “therapist and Linda storyline” as, unexpectedly, “the love story of the film, in a way.” That juxtaposition of tenderness framed by exhaustion is where the movie finds its most honest beats. Byrne calls one of those beats “the most honest beat in the film for her, for the character,” and it’s easy to see why audiences have found it quietly devastating. “This lives… this film lives in that… in that space,” she says.
There’s also disarming humor. Byrne laughs describing moments that were “really fun to shoot, because it was a different rhythm — a little dance, and those scenes were really fun, and funny, you know.” But the laughter never undermines the film’s seriousness; rather, it humanizes the characters. Byrne tells of the small, domestic humiliations that the movie treats with reverence “maybe that your yogurt lid peeled off incorrectly and it spilt on you” the kind of detail that makes a story familiar and uncanny at once.
Byrne is candid about the stakes of getting this performance right. “I felt like, oh my god, good lord, I hope I don't mess this up,” she admits, and the admission is less stage fright than an actor’s humility in front of material that requires precision and restraint. “It was my job to just give her… give her the options,” she explains of collaborating with Mary, to help the director find “what the film is.”
The film is also, Byrne notes, a commentary on who we listen to and who we don’t. “Women aren’t helped, and aren’t listened to,” she says, praising Mary’s skill at “threading that needle very, very beautifully.” The cumulative effect of small indignities, a lifetime of being dismissed, minimized, or gaslit is at the film’s emotional center. Byrne’s Linda navigates that terrain with a mix of defiance and weariness, and Byrne’s performance honors both impulses.
The interpersonal relationships in the movie add further texture. Byrne describes A$ap Rocky’s character as “the kindest character in the film,” and she points to scenes that show tenderness in surprising places. Those quieter moments, the “caretaker” aspects of Linda, the private intimacies between characters are what make the film’s more jolting sequences land.
Even the ending, Byrne suggests, contains a sliver of hard-won hope. Discussing the final image of a child, an instinct toward continuity, “How can you not end on a child and have hope, you know?” It’s not a tidy resolution so much as an insistence that tenderness persists.
For Byrne, making the film was also about navigating the practicalities of indie life: quick schedules, nimble choices, and the need to trust collaborators. “Especially on an indie film, it's very quick,” she notes, and that economy of time seems to have sharpened rather than dulled the performances. The result is a movie that feels lived-in and exact, intimate and expansive.
Byrne feels delighted by the evocative responses to the film,. “it's been fascinating, because not everyone’s understood this film, because it was a feeling that she's having,” she reflects. And that, perhaps, is the highest compliment: a film that refuses to hand you answers but gives you something far more valuable, the permission to feel, to notice, and to carry with you a character whose small private life suddenly seems vast.
