Rose Byrne laughs at the word unlikable—mainly because, particularly in the case of her latest project, she’s come to expect it. Her Apple TV+ series Physical, currently airing its second season in weekly drops on the streamer, hit viewers hard and fast upon its debut last summer, plunging us into the toxic mental gymnastics of the adrift Sheila Rubin, who begins a journey of self-discovery via aerobics in ‘80s San Diego. Forget her traumatic childhood, her highly flawed marriage, the money problems, and the severe eating disorder. As told through her brutally honest internal monologue, this brave new exercise world promises independence, agency, and power.

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Byrne executives produces the audacious half-hour, created by Annie Weisman and now costarring the great Murray Bartlett, in his first post-White Lotus role, as an enigmatic wellness guru. It’s her biggest behind-the-scenes role in Hollywood to date, and it makes sense for the project, which offers a staggering showcase of Byrne’s ability to weave between laugh-out-loud comedy and poignant drama. This is the actor who received two Emmy nominations for her central role in Damages, the dark legal thriller starring Glenn Close, only to go on to steal scenes in big screen studio comedies ranging from Bridesmaids to Spy to Neighbors.

She’s currently experiencing a sort of reunion of that lattermost comedy project, shooting the forthcoming Apple series Platonic opposite her Neighbors husband Seth Rogen, and created by that film’s director, Nick Stoller. She went straight into it from production on season two of Physical. “Ideally you wouldn’t want to do two shows in a year, but it’s fine,” she says with a laugh. “It’s working with old friends, reuniting with Seth again—and it’s very different from Physical.”

Joining Little Gold Men during a production break (read and listen to the full interview below), Byrne speaks about her attraction to keeping things different in her career, but one reason so much of her resumé consists of work that feels ahead of its time—Physical a prime example.

Going into season two of Physical, which feels just as complex and thorny and sticky as the first, if not more so—it’s the first time you’d done a continuing series since Damages. What did that feel like, jumping back in?

It was actually really exciting, because I was so thrilled with the script and with Annie, and I was really daunted and excited in the best possible way. I had just finished Mrs. America [before season one] and it felt sort of somewhat like a companion piece to that weirdly in a creative way; definitely in a chronological way, historically. We were definitely covering new ground with this show; stuff I don’t think I’ve seen personally represented on screen in the way that we do on the show, I’ve never seen as a viewer. So when you’re doing something like that, it does feel pretty nerve-wracking and daunting and thrilling all at the same time.

Both Physical and Damages felt intense to watch, let alone make. Did that kind of experience on Damages teach you or prepare you for another kind of psychologically demanding piece, that you keep coming back to?

Technically, there’s nothing like a TV schedule. There just isn’t. Damages was the hard and fast training ground for that. And particularly the way those writers worked—they very much writing the night before or that morning. [Laughs] So constant evolution and change. That’s a real muscle that you have to work at. And Glenn and I definitely became pretty good at learning of dialogue and assimilating it and trying to perform it. All of that absolutely informs going headfirst into another series.

You’re not surprised anymore by a long day or a quick re-write.

No. But on Platonic, we’ve got like nine-page scenes and they’re all hard comedy scenes, and I’m like, “Wow, I haven’t done this for a while.” This is very much what it was like on Neighbors or Get Him to The Greek or Bridesmaids, you know, all the bigger comedies that I’ve done. You do have these long set pieces sometimes.

With Physical and the first season, as it started, you’ve got a character who feels extremely trapped. The word unlikable inevitably came up a lot in early coverage—

[Sarcastic] Really?

You’re shocked, right?

I’m taken aback! [Laughs]

In this case, it’s sort of baked into the show. I’m just curious about your encounters with that kind of reception. I completely agree with what you said earlier, that the show explores a lot that really hasn’t been covered on TV in this way before. And I do think that took some people aback a little bit.

I agree. The show can be polarizing, like I think with anything that’s breaking new ground, and I say that in a humble way. I have never seen something like this represented on screen; very stark and dark, and this humorous, internal dialogue that we were also exposed to, that everybody has. I mean, let’s face it, we all have it. And it’s just the human condition that we’re trying to condition and homogenize our thoughts, to an extent. Obviously Sheila is suffering and she has an illness, which is dictating this horrendous kind of prison she’s in, in her thoughts. I was personally so drawn to that. You try as much as you can in this business to be intuitive about work, and the choices you have and the choices you don’t have, and for me, this was very easy.

Can you talk a little bit about getting the voiceover right? It’s such a fine line that the show walks from the very beginning. I imagine there was a lot of working out some kinks and the exact voice of that.

It’s very technical. It’s something that’s always in the scenes as we’re shooting and we allow time for it. And I have a fantastic girl I work with, Kelly, who’s doing the voiceovers for me whilst we’re doing the scenes, if we need. It’s the final layer of the whole show, the last bit of texture that is constantly changing and tweaking, whether it’s Annie’s notes or Stephanie Laing’s notes, or mine or the studio’s, it’s just figuring out the different beats of it. And also tracking where she’s at with the illness. It’s something that we do really mainly in post-production, which I love. I’m one of those weird actors that enjoy fixing their performance as much as you can in the end, in the edit, and in the dark.

This season of Physical, especially, you get some pretty intense, dramatic material to play, about Sheila’s father and continuing to dig into the hauntings of her past. How have the little details of the character built up for you as you’ve played her, and what involvement have you had in helping to shape that?

Well, I’m an actress of a thousand questions. [Laughs] So every day, I come in and I can see Annie’s face, like, “Oh dear, here she comes.” And I’m like, “Annie, I just had a couple of questions…” and then I’m off. That’s definitely part of the day-to-day experience, particularly when the narrative is so much centered around this protagonist and her kind of swimming through the ocean of her life. Such a cheesy metaphor. [Laughs] I do come in always armed with 1,500 questions for Annie about where we’re at, where we’ve been, where we’re going. And that for me is always the best way to center and start every beat. Then of course you have to throw everything out the window anyway. You can’t make any decisions on anything until the other actor is in front of you.

Speaking of other actors in front of you, Murray Bartlett; my God, in this show, he’s so great.

Yes!

Your scene in his class, in the episode of Sheila’s dad’s memorial, is pretty incredible and also wordless in terms of everywhere you have to go. Using it as an example, can you walk me through the prep and filming of something like that? Just of the physical—not to throw a pun in there—requirements of a role like this.

In that scene, Sheila comes in, and Murray had been training with the dancers and his whole routine, obviously. Jennifer Hamilton is our choreographer on Physical. She’s such an integral part of the team and she’s really the other half of Sheila. And so we work very closely together. But for that particular sequence, Sheila comes in and doesn’t know what’s going on. So I just had to physically sort of follow what was happening.

But obviously she has these sort of realizations and finally lets her guard down in the class because of the grief of this death, which she has very complicated feelings around because of the trauma of her past and stuff. It was really fun and funny, and in a way, very much how Sheila was being taken down the rabbit hole of the Vinnie Green experience. [Laughs] Murray is just such a delight. He brought such humor and pathos and tortured soul underneath this bright, shiny poster boy for the wellness movement.

One of the things that’s great about continuing shows is you can have an actor like Murray come in and bring this whole new energy to something that feels pretty established. It kind of disrupts the whole thing in the best way. Did it feel like that on set?

It did, and we were so thrilled. We didn’t know if we were going to have him. Like everybody, I had just been so bowled over by his tour de force performance in The White Lotus, and we couldn’t believe it. And then he came and he’s such a dream boat. And he did disrupt and he did do all those things. He sort of sets this bar for Sheila to try to achieve in his part mentor, part rival, mystery and intrigue kind of surrounding him. We get another really great episode later in the season, which is even more—it breaks all the rules of conventional television.

The way Sheila moves, finds herself through movement, it’s a really fascinating way to unlock a character, I think both for viewers and for the actor. Physicality always comes with the job, to an extent, but what has that process been like for you, getting that kind of acting challenge, which does not come around too often?

No. And the thing is, I’m deeply uncoordinated. I am not a natural dancer. I’ve two left feet. So the training started early, and luckily, Sheila starts out not confident, but she has a dance background. So all those things that inform how somebody presents like a dancer is such a specific kind of character. You know immediately someone who used to be a dancer or was a dancer. I enjoy physicality so much personally as an actress—it’s such a fun and challenging thing. This is not just physically about the aerobics, but how she sits in her physical body herself and how disconnected she is to it. There are many layers. I feel spoiled for the fun of it all.

It makes me think of other roles that you’ve played where just the way the character carries herself might be a really big contributing factor. Bridesmaids feels like an obvious example in a way, because she’s so—

Regal. [Laughs]

Not a piece of hair out of place.

It was fun doing Gloria Steinem because that was so specific, the way she walked and spoke. And it’s funny with those historical pieces when you’re playing real people, it’s like some people just show up and you go, “This is it. This is who I am,” and other people perform in a very immersive way. It’s that thing of how every actor calibrates that when you’re playing a real person. I’d never really had that specific challenge before.

Which side did you lean toward? I feel like in that show, between the actors, you had a mix of the two approaches.

Yes. She’s so striking and specific in her silhouette, from her voice to her body to her hair, everything, I just leaned in as much as I could.

We are talking on the day that Roe v Wade has been officially overturned.

Yeah, we are. I’m not going to lie, it’s been a crushing, crushing blow. Listen, for every woman around the world, when America, the kind of the leader of—well, are we going to go down that road? Because it’s so sad. It’s just so much.

It’s heavy.

I did think of her. I did think of her. I read [the news] and immediately was like, “Wow.” Because her, like every woman of that generation, they just fought so hard. They fought so hard to get these things in place. All the incremental things they did just built and built and built to finally pass these fundamental rights. It’s a disturbing day.

The power of that show in a lot of ways was showing you the mechanisms to undo a lot of that work, though.

Yes, wow. Didn’t it ever? Phyllis Schlafly. And what a fascinating example. Yeah, really reverse engineering how we got where we are today with the political parties and how they operate, and these giant conglomerates like Fox News. Anyway. It’s a—anyway. We digress.

Yes, back to the lighter stuff. Another piece of Physical I was thinking of in the context of your overall work is the incredible costumes. I know you’ve talked about the fittings being highly particular, which brought me back to a movie I very recently re-watched for no specific reason: Marie Antoinette!

Well, that was Milena Canonero, who’s a four time Oscar winner. She won for the film. I remember wearing a costume that Marisa Berenson wore in Barry Lyndon. It was incredible. She put me in that at one point. That was every day. Talk about a special effect. [Laughs]

You are hilarious in that. It’s such a funny part.

That was Sofia. I remember putting myself on tape and it was very light and bubbly. The Duchess of Polignac is obviously a real person in history, but it was definitely one of my first opportunities to do comedy. It was very fun. It was very funny—working with Jason Schwartzman, and also, there was a lot of improv on that film. Jamie Dornan, who’s still a dear friend. I have very fond memories, and very glamorous Parisian memories of filming in these extraordinary locations that only Sofia could ever possibly get access to. The whole thing felt very privileged.

You’re now seen as an actor who very regularly mixes drama with comedy, but at the time, did you feel nervous about reading for the part, maybe shaking things up?

At that point, I was probably nervous about every single part—like I am still now. [Laughs] So it was still that daunting feeling. What was so fun was how she approached it. It was such a collaborative thing. And she was very inspired by current It Girls, like Kate Moss. I remember that was a great reference point. The film has really kind of become a cult hit now, whereas, when it came out, I think people were quite disoriented and didn’t quite know. But boy, it was fun to make it.

Pretty quickly after that, you went to do Damages, which was not funny.

Really? [Laughs] Yes, right after that was Damages. That was really when TV was—it was early days. You know, HBO had set the bar with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and Oz. And we came out the same year as Mad Men. It was a real time, that year that we came out. I feel very sentimental about that now. That was definitely the beginning of that era.

Physical, then, has all of the dramatic and all of the comedic components you’ve shown over the years, combined. For someone who has moved between the two pretty fluidly over the last few years, it seems to contain the whole package.

I felt that when I read it. And then when I met Annie and saw her keen, dry wit and how she just sees things—she can check the temperature in a room very quickly, andher writing just traffics in all of that sort of stuff in a way that I find very delightful and wicked and funny, and absolutely exploring the darker side, particularly of women and how we treat ourselves and talk about ourselves and think about ourselves. It’s uncomfortable stuff, but for me, it’s fun to do. And a show like this is so specific. It wouldn’t have been made even 10 or five years ago.

It’s funny, the notion that it wouldn’t be made five years ago, which seems undeniable in this case. It’s kind of true of a lot of the projects we’ve talked about—Marie Antoinette, Damages, Mrs. America..

Absolutely. It’s timing, like anything in life.