Going for the Byrne

SOME actresses are known for tears. Others specialise in baby-soft romantic comedies, or running in improbable high heels. "I'm the girl you come to for panic," acknowledges Rose Byrne.

If you haven't seen her fight zombies in 28 Weeks Later, or running bloody, disoriented and half-naked from a luxury apartment in the first episode of BBC1's Damages, then this may be hard to believe, because in person, Byrne looks as poised and serene as a porcelain figurine. However, in her baroque new thriller, Knowing, she's back emoting horror at the apocalyptic events foretold by her mother, a latter-day Nostradamus.

Yet in the spirit of full disclosure, Byrne admits she could relate to the film because there was a time in her life when she was a true believer. "I used to see a lot of psychics in my early 20s," she says in a London hotel room. "I'd treat myself every six months in England and the US and Australia. Eventually, I just malfunctioned and thought I'd had enough. I didn't want to know anymore – and they rarely got anything right anyway. It was just like a bad form of therapy really: you sit there and talk about yourself. So ever since then, I just try to live in the moment and seize the day more than anything else."

Something else she could identify with was her character's avoidance of her own reality: "I run away from things all the time, so I had empathy when I read the script. You take a lot of hard knocks in acting and you can become a bit broken and doubt yourself. It's just the nature of acting and rejections. But I think I'm probably tougher about it now."

For the 29-year-old Australian actress, Knowing also presented a chance to working with Nicolas Cage, who is, she attests, not like other men. "One of my girlfriends had worked with him before and said he was great," says Byrne. "He's incredibly dedicated and very serious about his work, but he also has a really eccentric, hilarious side to him. It's a very arid humour, which I love. Before doing a press interview, he said, 'Rose, I'm going to do this without using the words me or I.'"

Byrne has been acting since the age of eight, and landed her first film, Dallas Doll, an Australian comedy starring Sandra Bernard, when she was 13. If you admit you haven't seen the film, she's almost grateful. "Eric Bana and I have this theory that perhaps coming from Australia means that you get to do some of your less accomplished work at home. You get to make your mistakes on Australian TV and stage," she says. A case in point was Echo Point, a short-lived home-grown soap that turned her off TV for more than a decade.

"Echo Point was very much in the vein of Home And Away and made by the same station that did Neighbours," she says. "But we only lasted six months and we may have been a tax write-off.

"It was disappointing at that age because my heroine when I was growing up was Kylie Minogue. When I was 10, I went to all her pop concerts and I always wanted to be like Charlene, the character she played in Neighbours." Now she thinks that the shock of having to go back to an ordinary school instead of following the star trail of Minogue may have been a character-building experience worth having under her belt. "I was 15 and impressionable and thought I was pretty important for about five minutes until the show ended and I was back at school doing homework. It was a good, early crash course in the perils of fame."

Aged 19, she made the Australian smash Two Hands beside her friend Heath Ledger, but while the film took him on to Hollywood, Byrne seemed to be stuck on a path familiar to character actresses, appearing on stage, in some intriguing art-house projects, as a face for Max Factor, beside Natalie Portman in Star Wars Episode II, or as a priestess embraced by a brawny Brad Pitt in Troy. Often, the best scripts she saw still had the fingerprints of Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson on them.

Knowing is her first film since her profile rose dramatically last year with the twisted legal series, Damages. When she was first signed up for Knowing, she was still based in Hackney with her partner of five years, actor Brendan Cowell. Now Damages is heading for a third season and Byrne has bought a high-rise apartment in New York.

That's not all that has changed. In the first series, her character, Ellen Parsons, may have started out a malleable young protégé, struggling with knotty legal ethics, the demands of her boss Patty (Glenn Close), and a murdered fiancé, but after she discovers she has been betrayed she not only sacrifices her colleague, Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan), to the feds, but also shoots someone in the first episode of the second series, which has just aired on BBC1.

"Coming back was like a different job in a way. It was such a different character; it was a thrill," says Byrne. "In TV you get scared there might be some sort of monotony, but it hasn't been that way at all. I've probably enjoyed this season more than the first series in a way."

American television often calls for rough hours – a 16-hour working day is not an unusual expectation – but an additional demand on Damages is sudden rewrites with new scenes being presented to keep audiences and the actors guessing about the fate of their characters right up to the day of shooting. That complicated plotting is one reason critics and fans consider Damages addictive. Every character on Damages is damaged. Every one of them has secrets which make for plot twists and surprises as the season unfolds. After the first series, the creators kept hearing the same feedback: the audience wanted more confrontations between Close's boss and Byrne's underling. "Their dynamic was what they were intrigued by. My favourite scenes are always with Glenn. Everyone thinks she's intimidating but she's so sweet, and like a kooky, nutty, little, eccentric actress."

Really? One might assume that Close, who has played her share of dragon ladies in films from Fatal Attraction to 101 Dalmatians, is a reigning authority on the Damages set, since it was, after all, the autocratic magnetism of the Patty Hewes character that initially drew her to the pilot script.

"Glenn is really commanding with what she wants," allows Byrne. "She is very dedicated and demands certain standards that keep our show as good as it is. She's not going to stick around if the material's not good, and I cherish that. There is no show without Glenn."

Since the series took off in America, however, Byrne has become less timorous, adding her own input to Damages and expressing reservations about Ellen to the writing team at the end of the first series because "the audience knew more than Ellen, so she kind of came off stupid, because everyone was one step ahead of her". The refreshed, darker, more dynamic Ellen was her reward: "This season's been a lot richer for me," she says.

"Watching the interrogation scenes in the first series, all my girlfriends would laugh and go, 'what's wrong with you?' because I'm naturally very goofy. I'm the youngest of four children and a clown. But if you get cast in one thing and people see you in that, then you're it. It's strange."

Keen to locate a funny bone between panic attacks, Byrne squeezed in a romantic comedy, Adam, whilst Damages was off air last summer, playing a woman who falls for an emotionally remote engineer (Hugh Dancy) who suffers Asperger's syndrome. Shot in 21 days on a tiny budget, it was a return to rough-and-ready filmmaking.

"Obviously Knowing was pretty luxurious. For Adam, we got changed in hallways or shared weird church halls. But it was a great spirit on the film – everybody loved the script and was very passionate about it. And I was just determined to do a comedy," she says. "I'm done with crying for a little while."

Knowing is on general release from Friday. The second series of Damages continues tonight, BBC1, 10.20pm.