That’s just one of the reasons the 25-year-old isn’t getting carried away by her recent rise from little-known Aussie actor to someone on the cusp of genuine fame. In any case, Byrne, who has been acting professionally since she was 13, isn’t the type to put on airs. She learnt that early on in her career: “I was 15, and on a television show called Echo Point, and I thought I was pretty good,” she recalls with a smile. “Then the show finished and I went back to school. They cut me down to size very quickly. It was a good lesson.”
Now, having left her Bondi Beach apartment to move to LA, she is facing up to the reality of life in a city where there are more actresses than anywhere else in the world. “There’s so much competition. And that keeps me mildly sane — knowing there are so many people out there. I think a lot of it is just hanging in there. If you spend enough time in LA, then, hopefully, you’ll get where you want. But I have my good days and my bad days. It’s up and down, but I ’m a pretty up-and-down person anyway.”
Today, dressed in a pink top and combat trousers, with a large, floppy hat to shield from the sun the features Troy’s director, Wolfgang Petersen, described as “the face of a Madonna”, Byrne seems to be somewhere in between up and down. She’s cheery enough, but there’s a resigned, slightly tense aspect to her that reflects the fact that she hasn’t made a film since Troy. “I’m really anxious to get a job,” she confesses. “I think being an actor is like being an athlete; if you’re not doing it all the time, you get slack. And it’s not something you can do on your own, like painting.” She did return to her old stomping ground, the Sydney Theatre Company, after Troy, to appear in a play, but it’s movies that make an actor’s career these days. So, much is riding on Wicker Park.
A remake of the cult 1996 French film L’Appartement, it’s a simple story — of a man (played by Josh Hartnett) who, on the verge of getting married, bumps into an old flame — that unfolds via a complicated series of flashbacks and is told from the differing viewpoints of the four main char-acters. Byrne, whose role was played by Romane Bohringer in the original, is the villain of the piece, a deluded nurse with a secret passion for Hartnett’s character that leads her to deceive him about the where-abouts of his former girlfriend, as well as the circumstances in which she left him.
It’s a mark of Byrne’s ability to bring out the complexity of the characters she plays, while getting the audience to empathise with her, that she doesn’t come across as a mere bunny-boiler. “I’m sure some people will think she’s evil, but I have sympathy for her. It’s not like she kills anybody,” she points out. “You have to feel a bit connected to what the character is going through, and I related to her emotionally. She’s desperate about this person, and I’ve been in that situation where I’ve been ignored by someone I was desperate about. I think everybody has. I wouldn’t go to the extremes she goes to, but that’s the fun part of playing someone like that. It’s sort of Shakespearian in the way she’s tricking people and lying.”
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She has played manipulative characters before. Prior to Troy, Byrne was best known for playing the gold-digging sister in 2003’s I Capture the Castle. “It’s more fun than playing the girlfriend. Much richer and more challenging. I do go up for a lot of girlfriend roles, just because so many parts for women are like that. So it’s pretty rare that you actually get something to do,” she says. Certainly, she was underemployed in Troy. As Briseis, a cousin of Paris who is given to Brad Pitt’s Achilles as a gift, Byrne spent most of the film tucked away in Achilles’ tent, although all that time rolling around with Pitt did make her girlfriends envious.
“Of course they were jealous,” grins Byrne, who has a gurgling laugh. “They’re young, healthy females. But I never had a poster of him on my wall when I was a teenager. I had pictures of Jason Donovan — but I am from Australia.” Originally, she was asked to audition for the part of Helen. Instead, it was her Wicker Park co-star, Diane Kruger, who got the job.
But Byrne doesn’t seem to mind. “Diane and I are friends,” she insists. “We spent all of last year together; we were the only women, apart from Saffron Burrows, on the film. It was weird, but I felt like I was looked after.”
She has Pitt to thank for that. “He made sure we got time to rehearse and made me feel very relaxed. He’s pretty normal, considering how huge a celebrity he is.” The Troy shoot was a six-month marathon that saw the cast moving from London to Malta and then on to Mexico. “It was very much like the film, very epic, and it went on for ever,” recalls Byrne. “There were so many people and lots of days when you weren’t working. I was so crazy by the time it ended. It sounds funny complaining about being in Mexico with nothing to do, but you start to go f***ing nuts. Everyone did.”
But perhaps not as mad as the studio executives who expected Troy to storm box offices around the world, and who have had to scale down their expectations. “They definitely wanted it to be bigger than it was, but that doesn’t worry me. It’s always nicer if it’s as big as people want it to be and everyone’s happy. For me, personally — well, it wasn’t riding on me. And it has opened a lot of doors for me. It’s a big mainstream movie and most people had never heard of me before. Now they have a reference point.”
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It’s particularly pleasing for her because she has a history of appearing in films where her co-stars have benefited rather more than she has. She was impressive in I Capture the Castle, but it was Romola Garai who got all the attention; and it was the same story when she made her movie debut opposite Heath Ledger in 1999’s Two Hands, a sort of Aussie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. “Heath had been coming to LA for a couple of years before he got Two Hands. He’s a really good actor, so it was good timing for him,” she shrugs.
Nevertheless, in a town where naked ambition is regarded as an admirable quality, Byrne is maybe too diffident for her own good. Nor is she one to insist on the standard perks that come with acting in Hollywood films. While in Mexico making Troy, she spurned the use of a car on her days off, and instead used the bus to get around. Currently single, she seems the solitary type, which is maybe why, instead of spending her free time at the gym or kabbalah classes, she’s taking a creative-writing course at UCLA. “I like writing short stories, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something with my mind while I’m here.’ I like being on university campuses — they make me feel very young,” she says with a smile. Byrne spent a couple of years studying English at Sydney University. “I only got half a degree, but I went because I thought I’d better get good at something else, just in case the acting didn’t work out.”
Growing up as the youngest of four children in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, Byrne started taking acting classes at the age of eight. “It was my sister’s idea. She spotted me. A friend of hers was going to the Australian Theatre for Young People, and she thought I should go too. I loved it straight-away.” By her teens, she was appearing on television, but, unlike Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, or Jason Donovan, for that matter, she didn’t cut her teeth on Neighbours. “I feel I escaped, in a way,” she laughs. “I did audition for Home and Away, but they never called me back.” Given the fate of her teenage pin-up, it’s perhaps just as well she steered clear of daytime soaps.
However, she believes all that rubbish television is one reason Australian actors are flourishing in Hollywood. “I was talking to Eric Bana (Hector/The Hulk) about it, and he thinks it’s because we do our training back home in really bad television, and nobody has seen it in LA. It’s like we’ve made our mistakes already — touch wood.”
Having racked up a number of credits in little-seen Australian movies, as well as a brief appearance in the Sydney-filmed Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Byrne rarely gets to use her native accent these days.
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“I had an audition the other day for an Australian film, and it was strange doing it in my own accent. I almost felt like I wasn’t acting enough. It was like I was cheating. It wasn’t difficult enough.”
If her star is currently in the ascendant, then Byrne is too cautious to predict what the future might hold for her. “There are a lot of girls who’ve done just as much as me. I’m still at the beginning, really,” she says. Neither does she know if she will remain in LA. “I’ll stay here till the end of the year and then regroup,” she shrugs. “I might go home. I’ll have to live with my parents, but that’s okay.”
It won’t come to that.
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Wicker Park is released on September 10