Rose Byrne feels old next to her teenage co-stars
Rose Byrne feels the generation gap acting with teens in Bad Neighbours 2
She gave birth to baby boy Rocco in February but you wouldn't have guessed it if you saw her at a recent interview for her new comedy Bad Neighbours 2.
Australian actress Rose Byrne, 36, was slim as a reed and looked radiant in a floral dress.
She told M: "I'm only three months in so I'm just figuring it out. It's still very new for me."
The thing that gets her through the sleepless nights?
"Coffee, coffee, coffee. Strong coffee," she said.
Her boyfriend of four years, US actor Bobby Cannavale, 46, is a hands-on dad to their first child. He has a 21-year-old son.
"It's old hat to him," said Byrne, who gets the parallels to the new mother role she played in the first Bad Neighbours movie in 2014.
"You know, what's really funny is that it's a lot like that movie - it takes an incredibly long time to get out of the house.
"It takes 1 hour 45 minutes to get out of the house with a baby.
"And by the time I'm ready, I'm exhausted. I'm done. I'm going back in. I don't care. I'm really tired."
In the sequel, currently showing here, Byrne and Seth Rogen reprise their roles as married couple Mac and Kelly Radner, who are slightly older but not much wiser.
They have a second child on the way, have bought a new house in the suburbs and are trying to sell the old one that was the focal point of the original movie.
Everything goes smoothly at first and the house is put in escrow for 30 days but then a sorority moves into the house next door with its attendant rowdy parties.
Their old nightmare is back (their former antagonist was a Zac Efron-led fraternity) and, again, they have to use fair means and foul to stop the wild girls from ruining their future.
Buying and selling a house are not new experiences for Byrne in real life.
She said: "I've done both. It's very stressful - people get divorced over stuff like that.
"Moving is one of the most stressful things a couple can go through. But it's also very funny.
"Like when the buyers keep coming over and you've got to put on a good face. It's like this whole charade going on, it's very entertaining."
Byrne enjoyed reuniting with her on-screen husband, Rogen, who also produced Bad Neighbours 2.
"We have great chemistry," she said.
"He is very smart and lovely. I think we entertain each other, so it somehow works.
"That was part of the reason of wanting to do another film - to get to work with him again. He's really genuinely brilliant."
And she has high praise for new addition Chloe Grace Moretz, who plays the leader of the sorority.
PROFESSIONAL
"Chloe's great. She's such a professional," said Byrne.
"It was great to see her kind of let loose and be so funny. She's a natural-born leader, so it was perfect."
But Moretz, 19, and other teenage cast members definitely made Byrne feel like she belonged to another generation.
"Seth and I were constantly going, 'What did she say? What did that mean? I didn't catch what the whole sentence meant.'
"It was really new territory. That's when I knew, 'Okay, I'm on the other side of the fence here.'
"The girls are really, really young. They have incredible, really sophisticated relationships with their phones that I was just very impressed by. They were always on their phones."
So what's Byrne's idea of a good party?
"Just play some Stevie Wonder and dance. Stevie Wonder. Come on, he's got some pretty good dance tunes."
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