![]() ![]() She started out in dramas, winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, then appeared opposite Glenn Close for five seasons of the Emmy-garlanded show Damages. I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is a really raw look at things.’”īyrne has enjoyed an incredibly varied career thus far – bringing her signature malleability to horror movies, musicals and action flicks – with this show the latest string to her bow. Sheila is an extreme example of it, but I felt very seen when I first read it. “It’s uncomfortable but people relate – everyone who’s heard it has. “I’m laughing because it’s uncomfortable!” she says over Zoom from Australia. How did the actress find recording this unforgiving, judgmental narration? She lets out a throaty chuckle. Byrne skilfully embodies this duality, especially in Sheila’s painfully lacerating voiceover (“You used to matter”, “Nobody wants you”) that becomes the revving engine that drives the show. The actress calls out in a sunny, singsong tone that utterly clashes with the harshness of her internal monologue.Īnd just like that we know Sheila – she’s outwardly content but secretly consumed by shame and is, as we soon discover, silently battling against severe body-image issues and bulimia. The voice in her head prods at her insecurities with a sneer: “You really think you’re pulling off the disco sex-kitten look at your age? You’re not fooling anybody with this shit.” There’s a knock at the bathroom door. ![]() Byrne, in a ringleted wig and patterned kaftan, assesses herself in the mirror with a downturned expression of complete self-hatred, dabbing concealer onto a stubborn spot on her laugh line. Physical is a long overdue antidote to that.In the pilot of her new 1980s-set comedy-drama series Physical, Rose Byrne establishes everything you need to know about her character in three minutes flat. I was worried the “What if every character was nice? Would that be funny?” trend that Parks and Recreation started 12 years ago might have killed that off for ever. But there’s something dark and delicious about watching someone be an unlikable self-centred arsehole on screen and still kind of rooting for them. A woozy scene unfolds: we learn exactly enough about each character to be enthralled.Īnd that’s the point, really: Byrne’s Sheila isn’t nice, exactly (nicer than her husband, yes – but still). ![]() Episode one doesn’t really follow the clunking old beats of a scene-setting pilot show at all: we see Byrne’s Sheila come to, self-hating in the bathroom mirror, before Danny knocks on the door and tries to convince her they should have a threesome. I do have to mention this, after reading that paragraph back: the show is actually very funny.Ĭreator Annie Weisman has a background as a playwright, and you can tell: Physical has a level of guile about it that is rare on the screen. And then, enlightenment: she discovers the holy joy of aerobics – building an exercise video empire in the process – and the voices go quiet. And we see her fall prey to all her darkest and basest urges, stripping off her clothes in a dirty motel to eat three burgers and a milkshake alone before puking it all back up. We see her as the glamorous wife to an upstart politician. We see Byrne drop her daughter off at nursery and effortlessly cater a dinner party. ![]() But Byrne is playing two versions of the same character – the polite-at-the-school-gates smiling face of domestic bliss and competence and then, in voiceover, the insidious internal dialogue that fuels her self-hatred, telling her she’s fat, she’s old, she’s out of control, she’s useless. Rose Byrne, the star of the show, plays Sheila Rubin, a down-on-herself, unfulfilled housewife in southern California, 1981 – so far, who cares. So it is fair to say I am enamoured with this series. ![]()
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