Going deep

WHILE EARNING EARLY OSCAR BUZZ FOR HER LATEST ROLE, THE STAR IS STILL STRIVING FOR BALANCE

- Jennie Noonan

With a powerhouse performance as an overwhelmed mum pushed beyond breaking point in darkly comedic thriller If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Rose Byrne is already being tipped as an early Oscar contender.

“It’s so flattering,” she told USA Today of the buzz that has been building since she scored the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin Film Festival in February. “I feel very emotional about it. I’ve been doing this a long time, so I feel grateful to have had such an incredible opportunity with this character.”

The film, she added, pushed her Out of her comfort zone. “It’s obviously very dark and very dramatic, this film. And there’s elements of horror and Lynchian elements,” she said. “It defies genre in many ways, which is really exciting, but this is definitely a tightrope.”

Filmmaker Mary Bronstein - who first made a splash as the director of mumblecore movie Yeast (2008), in which she also starred alongside Greta Gerwig- began writing the semi-autobiographical script for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You while living in a hotel room near a hospital in San Diego, as her young daughter's treatment for an unspecified illness stretched from a few weeks to around eight months.

“I'd be in this motel room, in bed, staring at the ceiling,” Bronstein told Rolling Stone in October. “I started going into the bathroom and closing the door, and that’s where I could have my space at night, which was quite depressing... I felt I was having an existential crisis. I was disappearing into the task at hand.”

In losing herself, she found a purpose. “[I thought] I must figure out a way to express this feeling in cinematic language,” she said.

After almost a decade of development, casting Byrne, 46, to play Linda, a therapist and mother who disassociates while lurching from crisis to crisis, was a no-brainer, particularly after catching her in Apple TV's