Rose Byrne, whose impersonation of the laughing kookaburra bird of her native Australia on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon made her an instant YouTube hit, met me for lunch at Morandi, her local hangout in New York’s West Village. “Nice to meet you, John,” the actress said in her breezy Aussie accent. “Are you hungry?”
I’ve yet to meet an Australian who revealed any snobbery or attitude, and the fun, refreshingly unstarry Rose Byrne didn’t let me down. In repose, she can sometimes appear on-camera like a melancholic porcelain beauty. But in her jeans and Kenzo Paris sweater that day, she was more her natural, disarming self. She lives nearby with Bobby Cannavale, who declared her “the love of my life” while accepting an Emmy Award for his gangster role on Boardwalk Empire. “He’s a real romantic, isn’t he?” she said. “I’m a very lucky girl.”
A waiter came by. “You’re not doing breakfast, are you?” she asked him hopefully. “No, but we do have a frittata. If you like eggs, it’s pretty good.” So she ordered the frittata, with a comforting side of toast and a decaf cappuccino. “Great! Thank you.”
Her latest movie is an anticipated blockbuster for the summer silly season, Spy, released this month and directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids). The broad—very broad—comedy is Mr. Feig’s James Bond send-up, starring Melissa McCarthy, ever the lady, as a frumpy desk-bound C.I.A. operative who’s besotted with Jude Law and goes incompetently undercover to save the world. (Spoiler alert: she does.) Rose Byrne plays the Bond villain—a delusional Bulgarian nuclear-arms dealer with a cut-glass British accent, a wig that has a levitating life of its own, and the fashion sense of “a slutty dolphin trainer.”
Feig is the populist director whose underdog mission is to fly the flag for women in movies. (His next comedy is the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, with Kristen Wiig and McCarthy.) “He breaks convention,” Byrne says of him admiringly. “He did it with Melissa and Sandra Bullock in The Heat.” And crucially in her own career, he also cast her in her breakthrough role, as the perfect know-it-all antagonist in his 2011 Bridesmaids (in which Byrne notably held her own with S.N.L. alumnae Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and the rampant McCarthy).
What does she think of Feig’s muse? “To say Melissa is funny is obvious. She works incredibly hard, she never complains, she’s stayed very grounded—and she’s just hysterical! She can turn anything into ‘a bit.’ ” She improvises off the script—leaving everyone shooting a scene with her helpless with laughter, Byrne says.
In spite of her success, comparatively little is known about Mary Rose Byrne. Unusually in the acting biz, she’s up-front about her age. Though she easily passes for a woman in her 20s, she told me unself-consciously that she’s 35. She’s the youngest of four siblings—all in the arts—and the daughter of a statistician and a longtime administrator of an Aboriginal school. Her parents live on a farm in Tasmania, and she visits them quite frequently. Her somewhat eccentric dad has always enjoyed gambling on the horses. “Never marry a punter,” said her mom. The children were restricted to watching TV only half an hour a day. But her dad loved watching reruns of John Cleese’s irresistibly insane Fawlty Towers, the eternal BBC sitcom from the 70s. She can still quote the lines.
When I asked her what she misses most about home, she listed her folks, the beaches (she swims most days at a Y.M.C.A. in New York and has practiced yoga since she was 15), the limitless supply of Vegemite (“It’s an acquired taste, John. Heaven!”), and the Australian sense of humor, which for her is not taking yourself too seriously. “You can be the punch line of your own joke.”
Phenomenally, she’s already made some 40 films—in addition to her five seasons with Glenn Close on the applauded FX legal thriller, Damages. Her motley movie roles range from her first, when she was still a schoolgirl, in Dallas Doll (starring Sandra Bernhard, if you please, as a golf pro), to a handmaiden in one of the Star Wars films (“My finest hour,” she says. She had one line, which she remembers as “My lady, are you O.K.?”), to the captured princess Briseis in Troy, including a love scene with Brad Pitt’s bronzed Achilles (“I’ve had worse,” she said at the time). The liberating turning point in her new persona as a comic actress was Jackie Q, her raunchy female version of her co-star, Russell Brand, in Get Him to the Greek, produced by the king of film comedy, Judd Apatow.
Rose Byrne describes herself, with typical self-effacement, as “a jobbing actor.” It is the honorable, yeoman reverse of being a star and all that goes with it. She remains driven, however, never quite trusting whether she’ll work again, as all actors do. What does the future hold for her?
“Life’s pretty simple if you just relax,” she replied—happily quoting the line from Kaufman and Hart’s vintage comedy of family dysfunction, You Can’t Take It with You, in which she made her widely admired, too belated Broadway debut only last year, while secretly channeling her inner John Cleese.
