BYRNE NOTICE

THIS WINTER, YOU CAN FIND THE AUSTRALIAN ACTRESS AS A FEMINIST ICON, A CRAZED RIGHT WINGER OR … A MUM IN QUARANTINE

- Nick Romano

Rose Byrne has had more surreal experiences than most of late – aside, perhaps, from the one we’re all collectively living. She first felt it last year when she arrived in a small rural town in Georgia to shoot Jon Stewart’s satire Irresistible, about Washington DC politicians hijacking a local Wisconsin mayoral race. “We were a film crew coming in and taking over,” Byrne says. “There was an element of mirroring of what we were dealing with [in the movie].”

She felt it again later that year in Toronto while filming Mrs America (continues Tue., Jun. 9 at 8.30pm; Fox Showcase), the ’70s-era limited series for which she transformed into feminist icon Gloria Steinem. (“There were things we were discussing in 2019 that we were discussing on the show, whether it was abortion rights or equal pay.”)

And now, over the phone, confined to her Brooklyn home on an April afternoon, she realises that Medea, the play she wrapped on March 8 with partner Bobby Cannavale, was one of New York’s last stage productions to finish a full run before theatres shut down entirely in the wake of COVID-19. “We managed to do this right under the wire,” she says.