The Natural Comic Genius of Rose Byrne
Saturday, May 21, 2016 at 8:30PM 
This weekend's Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising certainly has enough antics to discuss for this month's Girls Gone Wild focus, but its most delightful element is returning star Rose Byrne. While she's not as impactfully utilized in the sequel as she was in the original, she is still just as charming as a slightly reluctant adult who understands what makes the youngsters tic.
The film leaves you wanting more time with her, but when isn't that true even when she is better served?
Over the past decade, Byrne has been steadily becoming our most reliable comedic actress. Her peers may be larger box office draws or recognizable names, but none of them match her consistently rich performances or surprising hysterical highs. The trifecta of Spy, Bridesmaids, and Neighbors are all starkly different women, for Byrne never fails to surprise us with the type of laughs she can deliver with ease...
That natural range is what makes Rose Byrne the chameleon that she is, her relaxed air making even broad characterizations like Spy's Rayna Boyanov believable. That withering loose cannon of a performance might not have worked in the hands of a more forceful performer, but Byrne is precise and intelligent at every turn. The actress turns Rayna into an effortless quote machine, with even the most throwaway of dialogue mined for comic gold. The "sad, Bulgarian clown" monologue is the crowning achievement of the performance, perfect in its balance of silly and smart, mean and sweet. Has there been a sharper, more uproarious comedy creation in the past decade that Rayna Boyanov?
But Bridesmaids still serves as the best reminder of how Rose Byrne is a character actress first. Her Helen is always on, projecting perfection to hide her pain and loneliness. It's when Helen lets her guard down that the performance is its most hilarious and honest, the laughs drawing from an all too universally relatable vulnerability and need to be liked. Melissa McCarthy may have been the Oscar nominee for the film, but Byrne is even more intelligently layered.
While her comic work is winning her new fans these days it's worth remembering that she shows versatility both in and outside of comedies - she's balanced genre films, comedies, and high-minded dramas alike throughout her career. If only awards voters were kinder to comedy she might have been recognized for worthy work like Spy and Bridesmaids, though she was Globe and Emmy nominated for her heavy dramatics in FX's Damages. This summer, she can also be seen in The Meddler and X-Men: Apocalypse, but maybe soon she'll get her own showcase comedy star vehicle. She's earned it.
What's your favorite Rose Byrne performance?
Reader Comments (25)
My top five favourite performances of hers:
1.) Wicker Park ----> This is when I first noticed her and she knocked my socks off with this performance. That final scene with her, Josh Hartnett and Matthew Lillard in the restaurant is AMAZING!
2.) Spy
3.) Bridesmaids
4.) Neighbours
5.) Insidious
With an outside shout out to: 28 Weeks Later and the first season of Damages. which is the only one I've watched.
Bless her. Rose was also the best part of Get Him to the Greek, even if that is a lower bar to clear. Rayna made me laugh the most, but I still think Helen from Bridesmaids is her greatest performance. I've never seen a bad performance from her, but do wonder why she seems less inspired in her dramatic roles. Maybe she just hasn't had the right character or director yet.
I thought her work in Sunshine was fascinatingly precise, but I've gotta go with Bridesmaids.
I lover her comic trifecta and I will never forget her in Clara Law's The Goddess of '67 for which she received the Volpi Cup as Best Actress in Venice
I NEED A SPY SEQUEL LIKE I NEED AIR. And yes of course Byrne would partner up with McCarthy this time around to infiltrate something or other. GIVE THIS TO ME.
Right now,
1. Neighbors (she made me laugh so hard)
2. Spy
3. Marie Antoinette
4. Bridesmaids
5. I Capture the Castle
6. Sunshine
7. Get Him to the Greek (she is really underrated in that film)
8. The Place Beyond the Pines
9. The Dead Girl
10. Adam
She also has a Volpi Cup for THE GODDESS OF 1967 and got to star opposite Heath Ledger in two of their earliest roles (the film was TWO HANDS and it was excellent).
I'd say my favorite performance of hers is her mama bear Kelly in Neighbors. Also, if you're listening HW, give Dame Rose her own comedy!! If anybody deserves their own comedic vehicle, it's this woman!
Two Hands!
It has to be Spy, if only for her hair.
I adore her in "I'd give it a year', an underrated gem of a romantic comedy.
Bridesmaids
Spy
Damages
and I guess I need to see the Neighbors...
Her best comedic performance is Bridesmaids.
For me it's a tie between Two Hands and Spy. Two very different films! Shows her range though.
I'm going to give a shout out to Wicker Park as well. That film is either terribly underrated or my personal guilty pleasure, but I really love it. And her performance is one of the best parts.
Also, Damages. Mainly Season 1, for some reason, I never got into everything after that.
Note that I didn't even mention a comedy...
She was kind of wasted in Neighbors 2. Wished she had a bigger role in the movie. Lover her in Neighbors, Spy and Bridesmaids though.
Would love to see a comedy starring her and Ryan Gosling, who was kind of a comedic revelation in the Nice Guys.
Her performance in Bridesmaids is genius. Not just comedy genius, but one of my favourite performances of all time (I'm kinda bumbed I didn't add it to my top 10 performances of the decade list we all did a while back). She doesn't get the best punchline jokes, but the way she delivers is just spot on, "I still need my drunken Saturday nights at Rock & Sushi okaaay", there's just so many layers in that one line. It's sad, it's bitchy, it's fake, it's desperate, she's trying sooo hard.
I always thought she stole the show in Marie Antoinette too.
Her audition for Get Him to the Greek on YouTube made me want to see that movie. Sadly, she was barely in it. Had the movie been about her character and Aldous Snow it would have been far, far better.
So much love for her Bridesmaids performance,it gets better on every viewing,Melissa is still best in show though.
She needs to be in more movies. Underrated as hell. And I'm so happy for her first child's birth.
While Rose is a comedic revelation, Wiif is also turning to be a dramatic gem!
Paul -- you do. she's amazing in it.
I am in full agreement that she's a great comic actress but I think she's weirdly overvalued in drama. Kind of flat for me unless she's got something funny to thread in.
I love her "Bridesmaids" performance in part because that cast was all improv actresses who knew each other and were good friends off-screen and then they decided that they should have a classically trained, "real" actress to play the villain. I think that definitely helped the dynamic of that cast. These are not Helen's friends. Helen does not understand these women.
I don't even know if it's in the movie or the deleted scenes, but Helen tearing up in the car with Annie (as shown above) is my favorite. "I don't think we got food poisoning at that restaurant." "No ... we did." "No, I think we all really got the flu."
I think she's very talented, but I've never understood how people see comic genius in her. I always think I'm watching a very good actress "act" her way to 80% of a great comic performance, but she's just not a natural comedian, so she can't get all the way there. She just lacks a spark or spontaneity. It's less obvious in Neighbors because she's not sharing the screen with Melissa McCarthy or Kristen Wiig, who genuinely are great comediennes. She gives probably my fourth favorite performance in Spy (after McCarthy, Serafinowicz, and Statham).
I first saw her in that awful movie Knowing, and she was terrible in it. I kinda just assumed she was terrible but after the comedy trifactor (as well as Get Him to the Greek) I see now she's a comic genius. Also thought she was superb in Wicker Park so it's not that she can't do drama, I think Knowing was just an all around terrible movie and she just checked out.
She was actually wonderful in the recent Broadway revival of You Can't Take It With You, playing the ostensibly straight ingénue role of the "normal" daughter in an eccentric family. She had such an intrinsic oddness of her own that she didn't need to be constantly dancing or raising snakes to feel a part of the household. Byrne just has such a great sense of irreplaceable and very human weirdness.