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Rose By Any Other Name
Radient and mysterious, Rose Byrne has been captivating cinema audiences with resonating performances since she crept onto the screen in 1999. She is now lighting up the small screen in the series Damages, where she finally gets to flex that tough ‘tude we didn’t know she had
An Enchanting Encounter
A blind girl with flame red hair stands in a darkened room, blue light emanates from a lone bulb. Her hands tremble as she reaches for the man standing bewildered in front of her and as the music from a jukebox begins to play, she starts to gyrate, clumsy yet completely unrestrained. Her dark unseeing eyes are nonetheless soulful, her cupid bow lips up-turned in pure joy as she spins uncontrollably. The Goddess of 1967, Clara Law’s 2000 film, follows a blind girl and a Japanese man as they journey through the Australian outback in a Citroën. Rose Byrne’s performance as B.G, whose carefree vulnerability bewitches the Japanese man, also mesmerised viewers. Introducing international audiences to that indelible something that Rose brings to the screen, it gained her Best Actress at that year’s Venice Film Festival, an LA agent and her first break into Hollywood.
“That was a really cool role and a beautiful film, I’m really proud of it,” Rose says in her soft, yet distinctly Australian accent. “I had a really exposing… umm sex scene. I was young, I was like 20 when I did that, so it was pretty confronting. The director was female and really lovely to me about the whole thing. But I was completely naked! The crew had all just done a film called Praise, which was very graphic and they were all like “Don’t worry Rose, we just did Praise!”.
Rose laughs warmly, and even down the line I can hear the appreciation from all those years ago in her voice. She’s talking to me from her New York apartment in West Village, on the same street as the Marc Jacobs store and opposite the Magnolia Bakery – the famous New York institution where there’s a constant line out the front for cupcakes, both equally as dangerous, Rose admits. She’s been here for almost six months, living with her boyfriend of four years, actor, writer and director Brendan Cowell. Rose spends what little downtime she has with Cowell, which means reading Shakespeare (Cowell just scored the role of Hamlet in the Bell Shakespeare production next year) and indulging in their shared love of food. “We’re quite the foodies. And I guess with us there’s so much time spent apart, so just hanging out doing nothing is fun. I can understand those couples who have rules, where they only have a certain amount of time apart. But this year has been really good, we’ve been pretty much together the whole time.”
In two days she’ll leave to meet Cowell in India, where he’s doing research for a feature film he’s writing. Before that she has a film festival in the Hamptons, a film audition on Monday and the photo shoot for YEN’s cover on Tuesday, immediately after which she’ll escape the heaving and unusually hot metropolis to another heaving and hot city. It will be her first real holiday since she began Damages, the HBO law drama she’s been starring in, opposite famed ice maiden, Glenn Close.
A New Kind of ROLE
The new job has instigated some big changes in Rose’s life. She’s moved from London to New York, nailed a pristine American accent, gone from battling killer zombies in 28 Weeks Later, to dealing with bloodthirsty lawyers and is relishing the variation from her usual “weepy young woman” to headstrong lawyer. “She is a confident, assertive, smart, bright, instinctive young woman, all at the age of 27,” Rose says of her character Ellen. “She is also really self-sufficient, which is something that appealed to me. I’m not the most confident of people and I really liked the idea of playing someone who is really quite different to who I am.”
Indeed, unlike your stereotypical actress, Rose is fairly shy. While polite and very friendly, there’s a charming strangeness, a quiet kookiness that lends the Sydney born belle an air of mystery. Her deep brown, almost sad eyes are hypnotic when staring out from the pages of the numerous glossies she’s occupied since her rise to fame. The face of Max Factor between 2004 and 2006 and named in the Most Beautiful People 2007 (Who Magazine), Rose’s brand of beauty is not your girl next-door variety. Elegant and brooding, she’s almost exotic, though like many Australians, her parents are of Scottish and English stock. Doll-like, her petite nose and delicate features are framed by dark brows that furrow when curious and leap when she breaks into hearty peels of laughter.
FROM THE SCHOOLYARD TO THE SCREEN
I first met Rose in the mid ‘80s. My earliest memory of her is sitting amongst a gaggle of young girls in my best friend’s basement on a sleep over, no doubt we were watching Stand By Me. Rose’s hands were never without a scrunched up tissue, used to wipe her persistently runny nose. I remember thinking she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. It was the first time I had looked at a person my own age in that way. She was like the human incarnation of Bambi, young and delicate with big brown doe eyes. For a while I was slightly in awe of her fragility, but it was the cute goofiness, with her snotty Kleenex, skinny arms and effortless laugh, that made her easy to talk to and totally tangible. The same qualities that have distinguished her from the droves of pretty actresses trying to make it today.
It was around the time of that slumber party Rose caught the bug. After playing Mary Poppins in the school play at eight, she started attending ATYP – Australian Theatre for Young People, with a posse of Balmain primary school friends. A casting agent came along one day and plucked up the fresh-faced Rose, who at 13 was cast in her first feature film, Dallas Doll alongside Sandra Bernhard. When she’d just finished high school she snagged a role opposite Heath Ledger in Two Hands and began quietly captivating Australian filmgoers.
In 2002 Rose officially entered Hollywood with a small role as Queen Amidala’s handmaiden in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. In 2004’s blockbuster Troy, rife with bloodletting and battles, it’s Byrne’s chemistry with Brad Pitt that gives the epic its emotional depth – which had chat rooms abuzz with queries as to whether it was on and off screen.
LONDON LIFE
The last few years living and working in London have been the busiest for the 28-year-old. She bought her first house in Hackney, with her older sister Lucy, starred in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl, Danny Boyle’s sci-fi Sunshine and 28 Weeks Later and the Canadian indie Just Buried. Rose says that for every Australian actress working in Hollywood there are a thousand out of work. Scary statistics for a humble actress and a factor which never leaves her mind. This instability triggers the occasional “crisis” for Rose, yet she’s keen to convey how lucky she counts herself to be a working actor.
“Australia’s a very small industry, everybody knows everybody in the theatre, film and TV world. America’s much more competitive, there are a lot of actors who are just as good as you. The industry as a whole here is more of an animal, it’s much more aggressive. It’s like real estate, it’s about making money, which I understand, it’s part of the job.” She chooses her words carefully, “It takes a while for you to find your confidence within that place, and it’s interesting to see the ambition and how people operate.”
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
While she still feels very much on the treadmill to success, Damages looks to be Rose’s biggest break into the US market yet. In the same class as series Big Love and The Sopranos, Damages saw Rose throw herself into a gruelling four month schedule of 18-hour days, where “By the middle of the night, you’re just like, I have no idea what I’m saying”. Rose admits that working with an iconic actress like Close, aka the “bunny boiler”, was intimidating at first, but she soon found Close, who invited Rose and Brendan to stay in her family home in Maine, to be “disarmingly sweet” and as a colleague enlightening. “She’s just so good it makes you better, she really raises the bar. All our scenes together are the best written and produced, because she commands a lot of respect on set.”
ROLE CALL
In The Dead Girl, for which Rose received some rave reviews, (“Byrne’s delivery of a heartbreaking monologue would’ve certainly guaranteed her a statuette, were this a film of a higher profile.”), she plays alongside Brittany Murphy, Toni Collette and Giovanni Ribisi and counts it as her most artistically fulfilling part to date.
“I had a tiny role, but it was challenging,” Rose says modestly. “It’s quite a heavy piece but I really enjoyed that weight – it was unfamiliar territory, very stripped back and unfussy.”
After the stylised grandeur of Marie Antoinette and sci-fi effects of Sunshine, the austerity was a nice change. “Though Marie Antoinette was sooo fun, like time travelling – the clothes, the wigs and make-up and just the locations, you really didn’t have to do much imagining of anything, it was all there for you, it was such a decadent experience,” Rose recalls fondly. “It was also much more frivolous and fun. I felt like I’d been getting a lot of heavier roles, when there’s another side of me which is much more light-hearted and silly. But Damages is my first role where I’m definitely a woman, I’m not a 22-year-old anymore.”
THE SHY TYPE
Never one to toot her own trumpet, Rose admits her discomfort at watching herself on screen, “I’m always in shock. It takes me a few days to recover,” she cringes laughing. “It’s only down the track, like five years later now, I can watch a bit of Troy and I’ll be ok. I actually think it’s better if I don’t watch it because I get in a real funk. I just run and bury my head in the sand.”
It’s rare to witness such modesty from an actress who’s been working in the industry for half of her life and seen such success. Inquisitive and fascinated, Rose is usually happy to turn the attention away from herself by questioning others. She is genuinely interested and sometimes I get the impression she needs to find out how other people work, like this knowledge will help her learn more about herself. Self-aware and considered with her replies, the young starlet gives little away. I think this is where the mystery in her character lies; you cannot read her like a book. One senses that like her beauty, Rose is delicate. Below the surface of a radiant and thoughtful demeanour there are layers that only those very near and dear to her will ever be privy to.
“I’m quite timid as a person so I think in terms of my career I’d like to be much more active instead of being passive, because I can just get really shy. I’d like to be more communicative about what I want and how to get it.”
Having been in the game since a young age, it’s safe to say Rose has travelled along the path to fame and fortune perfectly unscathed. However timid, Rose has a clear vision of who she is. She values friendship, family and a life in which foundations, like good food and time to relax with loved ones, are paramount. There is something soulful, real and resonant about Miss Byrne that has captured the eyes of directors and film audiences alike. While her looks may recall Bambi, Rose is certainly not made of porcelain. Despite her charming fragility, she is strong, even if she doesn’t know it, and her drive is evident in what she has accomplished as an actress.
Words Millie Ross
Photo Stacey Mark
Styling Jaclyn Hodes
Fashion Assistant Anna Del Gaizo
Make-Up Robert Greene (See Management)
Hair Amy Farid (See Management)
An Enchanting EncounterA blind girl with flame red hair stands in a darkened room, blue light emanates from a lone bulb. Her hands tremble as she reaches for the man standing bewildered in front of her and as the music from a jukebox begins to play, she starts to gyrate, clumsy yet completely unrestrained. Her dark unseeing eyes are nonetheless soulful, her cupid bow lips up-turned in pure joy as she spins uncontrollably. The Goddess of 1967, Clara Law’s 2000 film, follows a blind girl and a Japanese man as they journey through the Australian outback in a Citroën. Rose Byrne’s performance as B.G, whose carefree vulnerability bewitches the Japanese man, also mesmerised viewers. Introducing international audiences to that indelible something that Rose brings to the screen, it gained her Best Actress at that year’s Venice Film Festival, an LA agent and her first break into Hollywood.
“That was a really cool role and a beautiful film, I’m really proud of it,” Rose says in her soft, yet distinctly Australian accent. “I had a really exposing… umm sex scene. I was young, I was like 20 when I did that, so it was pretty confronting. The director was female and really lovely to me about the whole thing. But I was completely naked! The crew had all just done a film called Praise, which was very graphic and they were all like “Don’t worry Rose, we just did Praise!”.
Rose laughs warmly, and even down the line I can hear the appreciation from all those years ago in her voice. She’s talking to me from her New York apartment in West Village, on the same street as the Marc Jacobs store and opposite the Magnolia Bakery – the famous New York institution where there’s a constant line out the front for cupcakes, both equally as dangerous, Rose admits. She’s been here for almost six months, living with her boyfriend of four years, actor, writer and director Brendan Cowell. Rose spends what little downtime she has with Cowell, which means reading Shakespeare (Cowell just scored the role of Hamlet in the Bell Shakespeare production next year) and indulging in their shared love of food. “We’re quite the foodies. And I guess with us there’s so much time spent apart, so just hanging out doing nothing is fun. I can understand those couples who have rules, where they only have a certain amount of time apart. But this year has been really good, we’ve been pretty much together the whole time.”
In two days she’ll leave to meet Cowell in India, where he’s doing research for a feature film he’s writing. Before that she has a film festival in the Hamptons, a film audition on Monday and the photo shoot for YEN’s cover on Tuesday, immediately after which she’ll escape the heaving and unusually hot metropolis to another heaving and hot city. It will be her first real holiday since she began Damages, the HBO law drama she’s been starring in, opposite famed ice maiden, Glenn Close.
A New Kind of ROLE
The new job has instigated some big changes in Rose’s life. She’s moved from London to New York, nailed a pristine American accent, gone from battling killer zombies in 28 Weeks Later, to dealing with bloodthirsty lawyers and is relishing the variation from her usual “weepy young woman” to headstrong lawyer. “She is a confident, assertive, smart, bright, instinctive young woman, all at the age of 27,” Rose says of her character Ellen. “She is also really self-sufficient, which is something that appealed to me. I’m not the most confident of people and I really liked the idea of playing someone who is really quite different to who I am.”
Indeed, unlike your stereotypical actress, Rose is fairly shy. While polite and very friendly, there’s a charming strangeness, a quiet kookiness that lends the Sydney born belle an air of mystery. Her deep brown, almost sad eyes are hypnotic when staring out from the pages of the numerous glossies she’s occupied since her rise to fame. The face of Max Factor between 2004 and 2006 and named in the Most Beautiful People 2007 (Who Magazine), Rose’s brand of beauty is not your girl next-door variety. Elegant and brooding, she’s almost exotic, though like many Australians, her parents are of Scottish and English stock. Doll-like, her petite nose and delicate features are framed by dark brows that furrow when curious and leap when she breaks into hearty peels of laughter.
FROM THE SCHOOLYARD TO THE SCREEN
I first met Rose in the mid ‘80s. My earliest memory of her is sitting amongst a gaggle of young girls in my best friend’s basement on a sleep over, no doubt we were watching Stand By Me. Rose’s hands were never without a scrunched up tissue, used to wipe her persistently runny nose. I remember thinking she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. It was the first time I had looked at a person my own age in that way. She was like the human incarnation of Bambi, young and delicate with big brown doe eyes. For a while I was slightly in awe of her fragility, but it was the cute goofiness, with her snotty Kleenex, skinny arms and effortless laugh, that made her easy to talk to and totally tangible. The same qualities that have distinguished her from the droves of pretty actresses trying to make it today.
It was around the time of that slumber party Rose caught the bug. After playing Mary Poppins in the school play at eight, she started attending ATYP – Australian Theatre for Young People, with a posse of Balmain primary school friends. A casting agent came along one day and plucked up the fresh-faced Rose, who at 13 was cast in her first feature film, Dallas Doll alongside Sandra Bernhard. When she’d just finished high school she snagged a role opposite Heath Ledger in Two Hands and began quietly captivating Australian filmgoers.
In 2002 Rose officially entered Hollywood with a small role as Queen Amidala’s handmaiden in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. In 2004’s blockbuster Troy, rife with bloodletting and battles, it’s Byrne’s chemistry with Brad Pitt that gives the epic its emotional depth – which had chat rooms abuzz with queries as to whether it was on and off screen.
LONDON LIFE
The last few years living and working in London have been the busiest for the 28-year-old. She bought her first house in Hackney, with her older sister Lucy, starred in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl, Danny Boyle’s sci-fi Sunshine and 28 Weeks Later and the Canadian indie Just Buried. Rose says that for every Australian actress working in Hollywood there are a thousand out of work. Scary statistics for a humble actress and a factor which never leaves her mind. This instability triggers the occasional “crisis” for Rose, yet she’s keen to convey how lucky she counts herself to be a working actor.
“Australia’s a very small industry, everybody knows everybody in the theatre, film and TV world. America’s much more competitive, there are a lot of actors who are just as good as you. The industry as a whole here is more of an animal, it’s much more aggressive. It’s like real estate, it’s about making money, which I understand, it’s part of the job.” She chooses her words carefully, “It takes a while for you to find your confidence within that place, and it’s interesting to see the ambition and how people operate.”
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
While she still feels very much on the treadmill to success, Damages looks to be Rose’s biggest break into the US market yet. In the same class as series Big Love and The Sopranos, Damages saw Rose throw herself into a gruelling four month schedule of 18-hour days, where “By the middle of the night, you’re just like, I have no idea what I’m saying”. Rose admits that working with an iconic actress like Close, aka the “bunny boiler”, was intimidating at first, but she soon found Close, who invited Rose and Brendan to stay in her family home in Maine, to be “disarmingly sweet” and as a colleague enlightening. “She’s just so good it makes you better, she really raises the bar. All our scenes together are the best written and produced, because she commands a lot of respect on set.”
ROLE CALL
In The Dead Girl, for which Rose received some rave reviews, (“Byrne’s delivery of a heartbreaking monologue would’ve certainly guaranteed her a statuette, were this a film of a higher profile.”), she plays alongside Brittany Murphy, Toni Collette and Giovanni Ribisi and counts it as her most artistically fulfilling part to date.
“I had a tiny role, but it was challenging,” Rose says modestly. “It’s quite a heavy piece but I really enjoyed that weight – it was unfamiliar territory, very stripped back and unfussy.”
After the stylised grandeur of Marie Antoinette and sci-fi effects of Sunshine, the austerity was a nice change. “Though Marie Antoinette was sooo fun, like time travelling – the clothes, the wigs and make-up and just the locations, you really didn’t have to do much imagining of anything, it was all there for you, it was such a decadent experience,” Rose recalls fondly. “It was also much more frivolous and fun. I felt like I’d been getting a lot of heavier roles, when there’s another side of me which is much more light-hearted and silly. But Damages is my first role where I’m definitely a woman, I’m not a 22-year-old anymore.”
THE SHY TYPE
Never one to toot her own trumpet, Rose admits her discomfort at watching herself on screen, “I’m always in shock. It takes me a few days to recover,” she cringes laughing. “It’s only down the track, like five years later now, I can watch a bit of Troy and I’ll be ok. I actually think it’s better if I don’t watch it because I get in a real funk. I just run and bury my head in the sand.”
It’s rare to witness such modesty from an actress who’s been working in the industry for half of her life and seen such success. Inquisitive and fascinated, Rose is usually happy to turn the attention away from herself by questioning others. She is genuinely interested and sometimes I get the impression she needs to find out how other people work, like this knowledge will help her learn more about herself. Self-aware and considered with her replies, the young starlet gives little away. I think this is where the mystery in her character lies; you cannot read her like a book. One senses that like her beauty, Rose is delicate. Below the surface of a radiant and thoughtful demeanour there are layers that only those very near and dear to her will ever be privy to.
“I’m quite timid as a person so I think in terms of my career I’d like to be much more active instead of being passive, because I can just get really shy. I’d like to be more communicative about what I want and how to get it.”
Having been in the game since a young age, it’s safe to say Rose has travelled along the path to fame and fortune perfectly unscathed. However timid, Rose has a clear vision of who she is. She values friendship, family and a life in which foundations, like good food and time to relax with loved ones, are paramount. There is something soulful, real and resonant about Miss Byrne that has captured the eyes of directors and film audiences alike. While her looks may recall Bambi, Rose is certainly not made of porcelain. Despite her charming fragility, she is strong, even if she doesn’t know it, and her drive is evident in what she has accomplished as an actress.
Words Millie Ross
Photo Stacey Mark
Styling Jaclyn Hodes
Fashion Assistant Anna Del Gaizo
Make-Up Robert Greene (See Management)
Hair Amy Farid (See Management)
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