The exact moment Rose Byrne knew she wanted to be an actor: “I had never felt that before”
Whether she’s playing a dramatic role in her native Australia or impressing in one of the biggest Hollywood comedies of the year, it feels like there’s nothing Rose Byrne can’t do.
Her accomplishments include some of the biggest franchises in movie history, from Star Wars, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to the recent indie standout If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and as she’s still a couple of years off her 50th birthday, expect many more impressive entries before she decides to hang up the boots.
Prior to her more recent triumphs, Byrne rose up the ranks in the traditional way, with her first film appearance being a 1994 black comedy called Dallas Doll, in which she played a teenage girl obsessed with aliens. Before this life-changing moment, she studied theatre in both her homeland and at New York’s Atlantic Theatre Company, and if you go back even further than that, she owes her entire career to one of the city’s greatest sons.
In an interview with The Guardian, Byrne spoke about some of her earliest influences, wherein the lightbulb moment for her came when she went to see a production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, which starred Marshall Napier as Eddie Carbone and Game of Thrones star Essie Davis as Catherine, and changed her life forever.
One of the many great contributions from Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband, A View From a Bridge centres on a one-sided love affair between Eddie, a dock worker, and Catherine, his wife’s niece, with the story set against the backdrop of working-class New York in the 1950s and dealing with many of the issues that faced the Italian-American community at the time.
“It made me uncomfortable in the best possible way,” she revealed, “There were so many moral lines in the sand that I was conflicted about. I had never felt that before. I felt empathy for Eddie, but I was scared of him; I was worried for Essie as Catherine, but I also wasn’t sure if I trusted her. As the complexity of the story built and built and built, my heart was in my throat as I wondered what was going to happen. It was electric.”
The play premiered on Broadway in 1955 with Academy Award-winning actor Van Heflin in the role of Eddie, and over the next several decades, a number of other famous performers stepped into his shoes, including Mark Strong, Liev Schreiber, and Michael Gambon.
As for Catherine, she was played by the much-missed Brittany Murphy in a 1997 Broadway revival, Scarlett Johansson took on the same character 13 years later, while the 1962 film version of the story gave the role to Carol Lawrence, best known for originating the character of Maria in West Side Story.
Arthur Miller is without a doubt one of the greatest playwrights of all time, and the reason why many famous actors got involved in the trade, so while A View From the Bridge can sometimes be overlooked in favour of some of his more famous works, it’s reassuring to know that Rose Byrne will always be there to fly its flag.
