“I can’t shut up on the subject of Rose Byrne,” says Conan O’Brien. It’s true—he’s so impressed by her work that he wants to keep talking about Byrne even after our allotted time has run out. O’Brien makes his dramatic film debut opposite Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You , an agonizingly tense portrait of a mother in crisis written and directed by Mary Bronstein ( Yeast ). Byrne plays the antiheroic protagonist, Linda, with ferocious, wrenching, blackly comic commitment. Several of her rawest scenes are opposite O’Brien, who portrays Linda’s ever-unfazed therapist.

“I wish I could come up with the right word. I don’t want to use vacant terms like ‘blown away.’ But I was in a small contained space with Rose Byrne and I saw what she could do,” O’Brien tells me. “And I will be

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