Rose Byrne Gets ‘Emotional’ About Oscar Buzz for ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

Could Rose Byrne soon become a first-time Oscar nominee? 

The Australian actress, 46, is earning considerable praise for her performance in the new A24 movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, in theaters since Oct. 10. “It’s so flattering,” Byrne told USA Today of the buzz. “I feel very emotional about it.”

“I’ve been doing this a long time, so I feel grateful to have had such an incredible opportunity with this character,” she added.

The Platonic star isn’t new to awards, having earned two ​​Primetime Emmy nominations for the legal drama Damages; a Critics Choice Award nomination for 2014’s Neighbors; an Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award for 2013’s The Turning; and more. She earned the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 2000 Venice Film Festival for her first lead role in The Goddess of 1967.

However, Byrne has never broken through with Oscar voters, so If I Had Legs I’d Kick You could earn her the first Best Actress Oscar nomination of her career. The darkly comic thriller from writer-director Mary Bronstein premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and won Byrne a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The movie, costarring Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald and A$AP Rocky, centers on Byrne’s Linda, a therapist, wife and mother to a sick child (played by Delaney Quinn). The overwhelmed woman “attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist,” as an official synopsis reads. 

Bronstein pushed the movie’s humor “to lengths that I’ve never played before,” Byrne told USA Today. “It’s obviously very dark and very dramatic, this film. And there’s elements of horror and Lynchian elements. It defies genre in many ways, which is really exciting, but this is definitely a tightrope.”

Her favorite comedic actor, she said, is Robert De Niro. “That’s obviously not something maybe necessarily people would say at the top of their head,” Byrne said, but “look at him, he’s so funny in his intensity.”

Australians like her, the Bridesmaids star added, “are very much bred to not take ourselves too seriously but to take the work seriously.”

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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in theaters now and Byrne can also be seen in Platonic season 2, opposite Seth Rogen. She also stars in the upcoming drama series The Good Daughter.