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Try a Little Tenderness
Returning to work in Australia for the first time since 2003, ROSE BYRNE puts her own spin on the femme fatale in the unconventional jazz age crime drama THE TENDER HOOK.
"I hadn't worked in Australia for quite some time, so I was really keen to work at home again." It's a little bit ironic - but hardly surprising - that Rose Byrne is speaking these words about her latest film The Tender Hook down a phone line from New York City. The 29-year-old actress (who hardly seems to have aged in the last ten years) appears to legitimately fall into international work; there's not even a remote whiff of the ruthlessness or blind ambition that is an assumed prerequisite in cracking the big time in the American entertainment industry. "I've been going over to the states since I was eighteen," Byrne told FILMINK in 2003. "I'd go for a few weeks at a time, and then a few months at a time. It takes a while for them to take you seriously."
Rose Byrne is certainly being taken seriously now. She's currently in New York enjoying some down time from the TV series Damages, in which she stars as Ellen Parsons, an inexperienced but keenly intelligent law school graduate who finds herself under the wing of willful high stakes litigator Patricia Hewes, played by Glenn Close. A victim of the recent writers' strike, the show's scheduling was thrown into chaos, but good reviews and solid ratings ensured that it was picked up for a second season in December. But after shooting for a few months, Byrne is once again killing time - the writers are no longer on strike, but they're now struggling to get back on track, so filming has been put on hold. "The writers are kind of trying to catch up at the moment," she explains.
And this hiatus suits Byrne - who always seems carefree, happy and relaxed during interviews - just fine. She's taking the opportunity to enjoy New York in the summer and do a bit of press for her latest film, The Tender Hook, which marks Byrne's first work in Australia since she starred in a number of local flicks (Takeaway, The Rage In Placid Lake, The Night We Called It A Day) back in 2003. Directed by debut filmmaker Jonathan Ogilvie, The Tender Hook is set in 1920s Sydney, an era of sly grog, rigged boxing matches, stylish gangsters and shimmering jazz. Byrne plays Iris, a complex looker whose staggering array of charms have led her into the arms of the menacing McHeath, a British crime boss who likes to moonlight as a boxing promoter and flex his creative muscles by singing pop standards on stage in the string of nightclubs that he owns.
But when he takes a new boxer into his stable, McHeath's little empire starts to crumble. Art (Matt Le Nevez) is a fighter with principles, and that appeals to Iris, who hides a wounded, yearning heart under her increasingly brittle outer armour of high toned glamour. "He's what she wants, not what she needs," Byrne says. "He's so different from McHeath - she's directed to his directness and physicality. It's a magnetic thing. The scenes are really well written. The moments between Art and Iris are very flirtatious and provocative." Romantically drifting toward Art, and involved in a scheme to rort McHeath out of some of his beloved cash, Iris is walking an increasingly narrow wire, and she could be prodded to tumble off it at any minute...
"I guess it's quintessentially about Australia being the child of England and struggling for independence," Byrne says of the thematic undertow of the film. "McHeath is this aristocratic British gangster who comes to colonial Australia and dominates all of the people below him. We're pretty much his minions, but we're trying to find some kind of self-determination within that. There are a lot of different things going on with the script, and that really appealed to me. I liked the time period, and the setting, and I also looked at Jonathan's short films, which were really impressive. I knew Matt Le Nevez, and I knew Hugo socially, but I'd never worked with him before, so that was quite exciting too. The Tender Hook just fell into my lap at the right time," Byrne says of how the film came her way...
To read the rest of this exclusive interview with Rose Byrne, pick up the latest issue of FILMINK Magazine, available in newsagents now.