And we’re obsessed. As she bounces between daring dramas and sharp comedies, New York and L.A., the actor reveals how she can be all things at once, in life and art
Photography by ADAM FRANZINO
Styling by KATIE MOSSMAN
Words by ALESSANDRA CODINHA
Rose Byrne has returned to L.A. from the wilderness — OK, a two-day RV trip from Melbourne to Sydney in her native Australia, where she and her husband, actor Bobby Cannavale, and their two young sons spent a month this summer visiting her family.
“We did RV light,” the 46-year-old actor says over a late breakfast at Little Dom’s in Los Feliz. “We didn’t really cook that much. The gas wasn’t working a lot, so we had toast for dinner.” With Cannavale at the wheel, the family could sleep in. “Bobby was good! It was hard to drive, dragging this really heavy thing behind you.” They saw beautiful beaches, wild kangaroos, and the psychedelically colored native parrots called lorikeets, all of which was exciting for a family who spends most of the year in New York and an increasing amount of time in L.A. “The best part is when you’re out of the RV,” she says, in a tone familiar to anyone who has ever spent time in one. “The sounds in Australia of the animals are really so different from here,” says Byrne, who was raised in Sydney. “For me it’s in my nervous system because it’s where I grew up. But for the boys and Bobby it’s always like, ‘What’s that?’ Bobby’s like, ‘It’s Jurassic Park!’ ”
Exploration of the unknown — and embracing a bit of personal wildness — is key to understanding Byrne’s current projects. The first, the L.A.-based comedy Platonic with Seth Rogen, has just dropped its second season on Apple TV+. This go-round, Byrne’s Sylvia and Rogen’s Will, decades-long best friends, are tackling new developments in their romantic and professional lives and confronting the shifting perceptions of what that means for their understanding of themselves in middle age. Plenty of high jinks ensue, including one memorable set piece involving kayaking the L.A. River. “She’ll try anything,” Rogen says of his costar. “Even after making this much stuff with her, I’m always taken aback by how big a swing she’s taking, and how funny what she’s doing is, and how kind of unhinged she’s willing to be at times, which is always just wonderful to watch. And how she really makes herself awful, which is such a joy to be a part of.” For Byrne, it’s a delight to be back on set with Rogen. They also worked together on two films: the 2014 comedy Neighbors, followed two years later by the sequel, Neighbors 2: Sorority House. “We have a really easy vibe,” she says. “We immediately get each other’s rhythm. He’ll set it up and I’ll knock it down. It’s very easy back and forth.”
“I’d rather hike that than get a massage.”
ROSE BYRNE
Byrne has filmed a combined five seasons of two shows for Apple TV+ in and around L.A. over the past five years, including three for the 1980s drama Physical, about a bored candidate’s wife who satisfies her own craving for purpose by making Jane Fonda–style at-home aerobics tapes, much to her husband’s dismay. Now back in L.A., she gets to revel a bit in the hard work that’s already been done. In 2024, Physical received nominations for outstanding cinematography for a single-camera half-four series and outstanding choreography for scripted programming, and Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance at the 2025 Berlin International film festival for her upcoming film with A24, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (more on that in a minute).
“I love working here,” she says. They shoot Platonic on the same soundstage at Paramount where Rear Window was filmed, a bit of Hollywood lore not lost on a woman who still appreciates the magic of the movies (and was reared on a healthy dose of comedians like Carol Burnett and John Cleese). She prefers to spend time on the east side — where she and her family stay with her brother, the art photographer George Byrne, and his wife — and hit the Aussie-founded TrainingMate for thorough but not overly punishing HIIT workouts. She loves Los Feliz, particularly the high streets and access to Griffith Park. “I love hiking,” she says. “That is the most relaxing to me. I’d rather do that than get a massage. You can’t do that in Brooklyn. You can’t just walk up the street and go for a hike.”
Byrne began her career in Australian television, then made her American debut in the 2004 epic drama Troy opposite Brad Pitt. A few years later, she earned two Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations for the TV drama Damages (starring Glenn Close). So audiences were surprised when she became a scene stealer in big-ticket comedies like Get Him to the Greek, Spy, and Bridesmaids, with her sharp timing and knack for accents. But after holding her own opposite the likes of Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, she has become known as a comedic force to be reckoned with. What makes her and Rogen such a good team? “Maybe it’s because we’re both from the Commonwealth,” she says. “Canadian, Australian — there’s something about it.”
Early in her career, Byrne was inspired by fellow Aussies who’d made the leap stateside, including Nicole Kidman, Toni Collette, Naomi Watts, and Guy Pearce. Some even became friends: In 1999, she had a role in Two Hands (her Sundance film debut), starring Heath Ledger, who was about to hit the big time with 10 Things I Hate About You. “We were just kids,” she says. She was 18, and he was 19 and living in Los Feliz. “He was a generous person. He was getting me in to audition for all his movies. I didn’t get any of the parts, but he was so sweet.” To promote Two Hands, they had a playful photo shoot in vintage clothes bought on Melrose Avenue.
Byrne considers her scrambled egg bruschetta and the question of what makes a good laugh. “I think that what is so mysterious about it is the ephemeral nature of chemistry with somebody in comedy,” she says. “You can have chemistry with someone on screen but not off screen. But then you see a married couple on screen and they don’t have chemistry. You can meet a funny person, but they’re not a funny actor. And a lot of comedians are really serious and not funny people at all. There’s no recipe to it. That’s why it’s so hard to do.” Rogen’s secret? He is known for enlisting from the same troupe for his projects. “Obviously he and I gravitate toward each other again and again because it works,” she says.
For Platonic creators Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller, nailing the character of Sylvia was key. “She needed a lot of charm to pull off all the ways she messes up and alienates people and wrecks her family,” Delbanco says. “She had to have an inner warmth that people would be able to identify with and love — that she would be a lovable, hopeless mess-up as opposed to an unlikable, untouchable one.” Stoller had already cast Byrne in Get Him to the Greek, her comedic break. “She’s one of the funniest people on the planet, and she doesn’t present that way,” he says. “You turn the camera on and she’s absolutely hysterical, in addition to being an amazing actor. She can also do drama. She can do everything.”
“I’m always taken aback by how kind of unhinged she’s willing to be.”
Seth Rogan
In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Byrne pretty much has to do everything. Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s film is part fever dream, part anxiety hyperloop. Byrne plays Linda, an overstretched mother of a young daughter with an unnamed medical condition (she is connected to a feeding tube every night). Linda’s husband is away for work and appears only in blame-filled phone calls, and she has a stressful therapy practice to run. Then the ceiling of her bedroom caves in, flooding her house. And did I mention it may or may not be a portal to another dimension? The movie is emphatically not a comedy, despite the excellent casting, which includes a deeply charming A$AP Rocky, who works at the motel Linda is forced to move into, and a very straight Conan O’Brien as her therapist.
The film is built around tight shots of Byrne’s face: every flicker of panic or fury; every suppressed scream as she goes another night without sleeping, monitoring the feeding machine; the countless insults and aggravations that come with displacement, home repairs, and a full-time job. It would not be far off to describe it as a horror. “There’s a lot of rage in the world right now in general,” Bronstein says. “But I’m very interested in female rage in particular and the central struggle — that feeling of screaming into the void.”
“Someone said a cool thing to me: The film is also an examination of anxiety. The state of the movie is like, up here,” Byrne says, vibrating her hand at eye level in an expression of frenetic, desperate energy. “That’s her head. That feeling when I think anyone is in a crisis, you’re operating up here.” What made her want to enter into someone’s living hell? “This sort of project does not come along that often,” she says, citing a script that read like Bronstein had “just lit the page on fire… I just didn’t want to fuck it up.”
During the 2023 writers’ strike, the pair spent three months together in New York painstakingly preparing for the film, analyzing the script and the characters, almost as if it were a play. They shot it over two and a half weeks in Montauk during the offseason. (Like a hardy Australian, Byrne did laps in the ocean every morning before shooting.) “I needed somebody who was an exceptional technical actor but also was able to be raw and vulnerable and totally turn themselves inside out with a very physical emotional performance,” Bronstein says. “That’s a rare thing.”
Despite the implied heaviness of working on an existential horror project like Legs, comedy is harder, Byrne insists. “It’s like lightning in a bottle. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of getting a laugh from people, I find.” Drama certainly has its challenges (she and Cannavale wowed Broadway with their modern-day Medea with Byrne in the title role), but “to make someone cry is less subjective because something is just objectively sad. Right? Name it, like that is sad. Something funny? Way harder, way more subjective.”
Having tackled all manner of genres, I ask whether there is anything new she’s particularly excited about trying next. She mentions Fallen Angels, a Noël Coward play that opened on London’s West End 100 years ago and premieres on Broadway in the new year. It’s a fizzy romp with Tony winner Kelli O’Hara sharing the top billing. A social satire about sexual dalliances of the British upper class in the 1920s may be a new tone for Byrne, but a familiar challenge: “There’s just nothing like trying to get a laugh,” she says, bursting out into a peal of her own.
Hair by MARA ROSZAK at A-Frame Agency.
Makeup by RACHEL GOODWIN at A-Frame Agency.
Feature image: SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO top, $4,600, skirt, $2,700, shoes, $2,050, and gloves, $1,700.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of C Magazine.
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