ROSE BYRNE

“YOU NEVER KNOW IF THIS IS YOUR LAST JOB… BUT YOU’VE GOT TO KEEP SHOOTING AT THE BASKET”

Rose Byrne is running errands in Sydney. While she Zooms with Total Film she’s flitting in and out of stores, making purchases, juggling shopping bags. “I’m so sorry,” she apologises down the line, “I’m multi-tasking!” It’s entirely appropriate that she should be spinning plates when we’re talking about her latest role in Apple TV+’s new show, Physical. Byrne plays a harried ’80s housewife, Sheila, whose school-run/grocery shop/husband appeasing days are interrupted by her own self-loathing internal dialogue and bouts of miserable binge-eating and bulimia. As a former free-spirited activist of the ’70s, Sheila has found herself trapped in a Sisyphean existence, playing enabler to her man-child husband (Rory Scovel) – literally once ‘a big guy on campus’. Until one day she follows a lycra-clad woman to an aerobic class which changes her life and outlook…

Tapping into ’80s nostalgia and the truth bomb of women’s real/brutal interior lives that recalls the dark humour of , leans into the gadgetry, fashions and fads of the era, exploring the revolution and emancipation that VHS and fitness videos could offer. And the leotards. Byrne laughs thinking about the dizzying array of high-leg one-pieces she wears in the show while showing off her jump-step-kick moves. And at 41, the actor is just the right age to recall the end of the ’80s. “I remember doing Cindy Crawford’s workout on tape. With her, in those jeans, doing a workout – in my living room, aged 12, and the craze of that reaching Australia!” she giggles. “But you forget how revolutionary it was to be able to exercise in your own home, and how that was, at the time, a new and a sort of bizarre concept. The idea of the lifestyle guru really is now a dime a dozen – everybody on Instagram is a healer of self-help, or self-worth,