While we’re launching something brand new and AMAZING for 2021, Rose Byrne is throwing it back to 1980, playing troubled housewife Sheila Rubin in her hit Apple TV+ series, Physical. Covering the debut issue of AMAZING, the latest magazine in the Wonderland family, Rose is the perfection representation of what’s to come from the biannual fashion and lifestyle publication: a woman of style and substance.
You could argue that Sheila, Rose’s character in Physical, is too – just not in the ways we’ve come to expect from female on-screen protagonists. Battling an eating disorder and many an inner demon when she discovers the burgeoning aerobics craze, Sheila is deeply disconnected, but that’s exactly what’s making viewers click with her.
“It’s been interesting,” muses Rose, of the week and a half since Physical debuted. “I knew the show was unlike anything I’d seen before and it definitely appealed to my sensibility, but it’s been really moving. I’ve had a lot of people reach out and say, ‘This is powerful.’ Sheila is not a typical female that you see on screen, so I’ve been very moved by those who have come to me with their confessional stuff, not to name names!”
Having portrayed 1970s Gloria Steinem in Mrs. America, which was released a year prior to Physical, Rose was happy to step in to the next decade with Sheila. “The eighties is so easy to parody and it’s often, you know, a comedy sketch. What I loved about Physical was that it’s not quite the eighties yet, it’s 1980, so we’re still really in the seventies when we meet Sheila and Danny… It’s a really interesting sweet spot for fashion. Kameron Lennox, our designer, did an incredible job. It felt incredibly authentic, so it never felt like I was wearing a costume, it just felt true to Sheila and to how she was living.
“I always loved doing my scenes with Della Saba, who plays Bunny, because she had such a fashion-forward take on things. It’s like when I meet a hipster today and I’m like, ‘Wow what are they wearing?’ I’m completely fascinated by the choices of the young twenty-somethings that know fashion and what they’re wearing, I think it’s great! Fashion is so fun. I feel like the idea of waking up and deciding what to put on to walk down the street, and face the world, is really captured so beautifully in Physical.”
Physical aside, Rose chats to AMAZING about her production company, Dollhouse Pictures, and their debut feature, Seriously Red. Shot in 2020, it hopefully won’t be long before the independent film – about an aspiring Dolly Parton impersonator – hits the festival circuit.
Then there’s that other iconic film Rose was part of: a little movie named Bridesmaids. Having celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2021, Rose reflects on what the blockbuster hit meant for women in comedy and the impact it’s had on her career since.
For more of Rose’s AMAZING interview, plus other AMAZING women, fashion and lifestyle features.