‘She’s actively rude’: Rose Byrne on playing a mother cracking up in her taboo-busting new film

2026-02-11 - 08:15

What if loving your child is destroying you and all you want to do is escape? That’s the nightmare Byrne faces in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The star and its director reveal why backers were scared If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for which Rose Byrne just won a Golden Globe, is unmistakably a horror film. And yet how can it be? It’s the story of a mother, Linda, with a very sick child. You never see the child, only the outlines of the anxious medics. You never find out what’s wrong with her, only that it involves a feeding tube. Linda is going steadily crazy, because who wouldn’t? On paper, this is a painful yet heartwarming tale of love and adversity. Instead, it is claustrophobic and vertiginous. It sometimes has the panic-attack surrealism of an anxiety dream, and other times is so real you can barely look directly at it. I’ve never seen the maternal condition drawn as a trip to the abyss. The only film I’ve seen that’s anything like this is Eraserhead. “I was very influenced by that film,” writer and director Mary Bronstein says, carefully. She’s a fascinating conversationalist, frank and open but watchful. Byrne is more reserved. Both are darkly funny, all the time. They look Hollywood-polished, in this central London hotel, but fair play, they’ve just come out of a photoshoot. “Eraserhead is about a type of parental anxiety that only men can have,” Bronstein says. “And this is a film about a parental anxiety only a woman can have. In Eraserhead, he can leave and that’s his angst. Linda cannot leave. That’s hers.” Continue reading...