“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is the tale of a mother (Rose Byrne) feeling increasingly underwater from all the stresses of daily life. In the movie, Byrne interacts with a few characters played by unconventional actors, including Conan O’Brien as her dead-serious therapist, and A$AP Rocky as a new friend she meets during a particularly stressful spell.
Writer-director Mary Bronstein and Byrne visited Variety‘s Studio presented by Audible at Sundance the day after the film’s festival premiere. Both Bronstein and Byrne said that one of the joys of the shoot was working alongside O’Brien.
“He was very humble and committed to the scenes and to this character, who was very counterintuitive to his own warmth and generosity,” Byrne said. “This character is not like that. We were threading some pretty fine needles with what was going on in these therapy sessions. It was a lot of a very intimate dance that we had to do together. It was a small movie and he showed up and he worked very hard.”
Bronstein also detailed the preparation she did with O’Brien before the shoot.
“He gave himself so generously of spirit and time and dedication to this project,” she said. “He read the script and said to me, ‘I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if I can do this. If I suck, you can fire me. We’ll still be friends. It’s OK.’ I actually did an intensive rehearsal process with him in LA, where we worked together for three or four hours every day for a week in his podcast offices. It was quite intense. It was like a theater workshop, and he was a dream. He trusted me so fully, which I still can’t believe. The character that he plays is so different than who he is as a person, and that was the hurdle to go over. Once we got over it, he performed a monologue that, when I wrote it, I knew was unperformable because it’s so pedantic. And he did it and worked hard. I was so impressed with him.”
Watch Bronstein and Byrne break down “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” in the full video below.