<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" You recognize her from Bridesmaids \u2014 the infuriatingly beautiful nemesis to Kristen Wiig&amp;#039;s messy maid-of-honor. How could you forget that face? You might recognize her from Damages, too, or Star Wars: Episode II, or Troy, in which she playedNatalie Portman&amp;#039;s handmaid and Brad Pitt&amp;#039;s doe-eyed lover, respectively, or even X-Men: First Class. More recently, she can be found in The Internship or The Place Beyond the Pines (when you aren&amp;#039;t too busy ogling Eva Mendes). She looks pretty familiar, right? Rose Byrne isn&amp;#039;t quite a household name \u2014 you still might have to IMDb her \u2014 but as an actress, the 34-year-old Aussie has been covering some ground. In fact, she just wrapped two new films, and her latest, I Give It a Year, just came out this weekend.A directorial debut for Dan Mazer (co-writer of Borat, Br\u00FCno, and Da Ali G Show), the Brit comedyis another chance for Byrne to be funny and, as she says, to get a little unhinged. We talked to her recently about improvising with comics and why Australians have an edge. ESQUIRE.COM: You&amp;#039;re in New York? ROSE BYRNE: Yeah. We shot Damages in the city for six years, and I&amp;#039;ve been based here pretty much ever since. ESQ: That series was a big block of your life. How was it when that ended? RB: The show was ready to finish. They&amp;#039;d told all the stories they wanted to tell and were probably a little weary. It&amp;#039;s a big job and KZK [Productions] really did everything themselves. They worked around the clock, and I think they were ready to have their lives back. ESQ: Were you ready for it to end? RB: It was really bittersweet. The show was my family here for all those years. We spent so much time together. I spent so much time with the character [Ellen]. And getting to work with Glenn Close every day \u2014 that was hard to say goodbye to.  ESQ: I imagine you learned something from her.  RB: Glenn&amp;#039;s awesome, you know? I admire her so much as an actress but as a woman, too. She&amp;#039;s a mother, a wife, an actress. She runs charities. She&amp;#039;s an incredible overachiever, but she&amp;#039;s very quiet about it, too. She&amp;#039;s a friend above all. ESQ: It was a heavy show, but Glenn&amp;#039;s no stranger to comedy. Did you see any of that on set? RB: She had a sense of humor about Patty and all of Patty&amp;#039;s weirdness and narcissism and power. She definitely found that in the role. Any good actor can find the comedy in a part, even if it&amp;#039;s subtle or quiet, just little touches. ESQ: Have you taken advantage of New York&amp;#039;s comedy scene? RB: I&amp;#039;ve seen some shows at the Comedy Cellar and I&amp;#039;ve been to UCB a bunch, in the audience. I&amp;#039;ve never participated. New Yorkers are spoiled. The people who come through here? You just glance at the Time Out and you&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;That person&amp;#039;s here!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;This thing&amp;#039;s showing!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s an incredible city to live in. It&amp;#039;s a mecca for culture. ESQ: You&amp;#039;ve been acting in big movies for a while, but you never quite became a household name. Did Bridesmaids change things? RB: It was absolutely a turning point for me. I&amp;#039;d never been a part of something that had been really, really so beloved and embraced and seen by so many people. I was just so proud to be a part of it. ESQ: Were you expecting it to be that big? RB: No! Gosh, no. You always go in hoping it&amp;#039;ll turn out great, hoping for the best, but you never know.  ESQ: Did the comedy come naturally for you? RB: I&amp;#039;d done Get Him to the Greek with Russell Brand and that was heavily improv&amp;#039;d and good practice, but it was still fairly new to me. With Bridesmaids, we started with the script and then went off on a path of improv. ESQ: Which duo was funnier \u2014 Vince and Owen, or Maya and Kristen?  RB: Working with Owen or Vince, or Maya or Kristin, or even Russell Brand, or Rafe Spall and Stephen Merchant in I Give It a Year, they make the comedy just effortless, across the board. I don&amp;#039;t know if it is for them, but as a collaborator and an observer, that&amp;#039;s what it really looked like.  ESQ: I imagine those sets were pretty fun. RB: Comedies in general have a lighter tone, but making people laugh... It&amp;#039;s a serious business. ESQ: And you got to do a little sketch comedy playing Fred Armisen&amp;#039;s girlfriend on an episode of Portlandia.  RB: I&amp;#039;m a huge fan of the show. You always kind of geek out when you&amp;#039;re actually in something you&amp;#039;re a fan of. It was really super-fun. Fred was great. They were awesome to work for. And I got to go to Portland, Oregon! Which was gorgeous and reminded me a lot of Melbourne.  ESQ: Your new film, I Give It a Year, is a typical rom-com, but it&amp;#039;s a little backwards, too. RB: Yeah, it starts out with this idyllic wedding in the English countryside. I was trying to tonally understand it, and Dan said you have to think of it like an old-fashioned, screwball comedy from the &amp;#039;40s or &amp;#039;50s. ESQ: It looks like a bit of a chick flick. Will guys like it, too? RB: A good thing to keep in mind is that the writer/director Dan Mazer wrote Borat and Br\u00FCno. He&amp;#039;s from a very primal, broader comedic sensibility, and this film definitely doesn&amp;#039;t shy away from the raunchier stuff. ESQ: My mind obviously goes right to Sacha Baron Cohen&amp;#039;s naked wrestling scene. RB: You know, comedy is such a funny, subjective thing. It&amp;#039;s very particular. Dan&amp;#039;s English and I&amp;#039;m Australian, so we immediately had a lot of similarities. In America, you have a lot of your own cultural references, but people don&amp;#039;t know much about Australian culture outside of like Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee. With England, though, we grow up with far more similar politics, sport, pop culture, and more of that broad sensibility in our humor.  ESQ: You&amp;#039;ve had to go back and forth with all three accents and all three senses of humor.  RB: Isn&amp;#039;t that kind of the greatest thing of it, though \u2014 that they&amp;#039;re all different? I love that. It&amp;#039;s kind of brilliant. For me, being able to be a part of something like Get Him to the Greek and then I Give It a Year is really just a testament to being Australian. We&amp;#039;re real bowerbirds in that sense. We can assimilate to both. ESQ: Were there any scenes where you got the script and thought, Oh no... RB: Totally. With comedy, it&amp;#039;s funny what takes over just to get a laugh. You come in with an idea of something, but then there&amp;#039;s this collective energy on the set, and you become a little unhinged, whether you&amp;#039;re planning to or not. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn&amp;#039;t. Sometimes you fail, but sometimes you succeed. ESQ: Let&amp;#039;s get specific. RB: There&amp;#039;s a sequence where my character is confronted with doves. That was an incredibly funny sequence to film because I&amp;#039;m actually quite scared of birds. ESQ: Doves? RB: Yeah, doves. You know the way people are physically scared of like bats or cockroaches or spiders and are involuntarily taken over? I have that with birds.  ESQ: How many doves are we talking about?  RB: There were only like two or three or four or something, with the trainers there and everything, but in an enclosed space \u2014 in a room.  ESQ: That sounds terrifying.  RB: It was really quite uncontrollable. The crew was hysterically laughing at me, and the whole scene tonally shifted. It was a weird acting challenge, trying to seem sane but being physically hijacked by fear. ESQ: A few of your characters start off a little uptight, but then by the end they sort of just let it all go.  RB: Nat, my character in I Give It a Year, is the straight man at the start, which was similar to my roles in The Internship and Bridesmaids. She&amp;#039;s sort of humorless, which was challenging because being Australian \u2014 I don&amp;#039;t know if you&amp;#039;ve spent much time with Australians, but we have a pretty good sense of the absurd and irony and not taking things too seriously. We always find the humor in a situation. But Nat was really the opposite.  ESQ: But she kind of cracks, like Helen in Bridesmaids.  RB: She sort of falls in love in the worst sort of way and when that happens you really do sort of lose yourself and don&amp;#039;t have as much control of your actions. It&amp;#039;s the greatest dramatic and comedic setup. ESQ: Do you want to take on more roles where you can just let go? Play some wild character. RB: [Laughs.] That&amp;#039;s what was great with Get Him to the Greek. I played Jackie Q, this flamboyant pop star who was such a narcissist and so self-involved and wildly, wildly unhinged. It was liberating and ridiculous and over-the-top and farcical. And it was interesting to research. I watched endless footage and video clips. That&amp;#039;s a great world to parody and satirize. ESQ: How did you prepare for this role as Nat?  RB: I had a great dialogue with Dan about the character, about people we knew, people who inspired the role. She&amp;#039;s quintessentially English, very middle-class, very intelligent, super-ambitious, an overachiever. She&amp;#039;s actually very different from me personally, which is exciting and scary but why you want to do the job in the first place. ESQ: So what&amp;#039;s next for you? RB: I just finished Townies with Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, which we shot at the start of the year, and I just finished a film called This Is Where I Leave You. It&amp;#039;s a really cool ensemble drama with Jason Bateman and Tina Fey.  ESQ: A drama with Jason Bateman and Tina Fey? RB: Yep. And I&amp;#039;m a big television watcher. I probably watch more series than films \u2014 I love Homeland, I&amp;#039;m a big Mad Men follower, I love Girls \u2014 and I just so enjoyed being part of one. Damages was pretty heavy, but I would love to try doing something comedic. It&amp;#039;s such a golden age for television right now. It&amp;#039;s such a part of the cultural dialogue. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a24253/rose-byrne-interview/>