While actress Rose Byrne started training early to get ready for her role as a 1980s aerobics instructor in the new series Physical, she wasn’t entirely prepared for the workout outfit she had to wear in the show.
“Exercising in that aerobics outfit was challenging, ” Byrne told a group of international journalists during a roundtable session that StarLifestyle was part of.
As the show is decade-specific, the outfits Byrne wore are a la Olivia Newton-John in the Physical music video and Jane Fonda in her famous workout videos – high-cut leotards and leggings.
“Like, that thing is tiny, you know. It’s like this big. I was like ‘How do you do this? It’s ridiculous’, ” the 41-year-old continued with a laugh. “That was probably the most challenging thing.”
The accomplished Australian actress – who’s adept in comedic roles as well as playing complex female characters – is modestly oversimplifying the multi-layered role she brings to life in the show with that statement.
A 30-minute dark comedy, Physical follows Byrne’s character – housewife Sheila Rubin – who keeps a flawless facade while silently battling self-hatred, self-doubt and an addiction.
Audiences meet Sheila when she’s at a breaking point, trying to balance all of the pent-up emotions as well as an eating disorder she just can’t get a grip of.
Within Physical’s 10 episodes we see Sheila making the initial discovery of her true worth – going from an unhappy, dutiful wife of wannabe-assemblyman Danny Rubin to a woman who starts to believe in herself.
And she gains this confidence through the world of aerobics.
First as a student who joins a workout studio to sweat out her frustrations, to materialising an idea for a business at a time when it was still quite taboo for women to have their own entrepreneurial ambitions.
“I read the script, and I just loved it. I thought it was such an intriguing and dark premise and such a great era to discover, particularly for women, ” said Byrne, who has been acting since the age of 14 and has appeared in various films including Insidious, Bridesmaids, X-Men: First Class and Spy.
“It’s kind of a great way to look back at how far we’ve come from the 80s to now where everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is an innovator, a blogger and an influencer.
“So many people do this thing now, but back then it was new and very exciting. And it’s a kind of an examination from (Sheila’s) perspective, about a woman with an addiction and an illness who finds a way out through aerobics.”
Let’s get physical
With the show’s inspiration rooted to the aerobics boom in the 1980s, Byrne began to research on this “distant, quaint cousin to today’s fitness generation” – as described in the show’s production notes – and found it really fascinating.
“What most people remember when it began was that, it felt kind of like a cult, ” mentioned Byrne.
“Like all these women in this space in Los Angeles with huge hair. And like a good cult, people were like, ‘Have you heard about this thing? Have you heard about it? There’s this place where you go, and it’s an incredible thing.’ And that’s what we really wanted to capture.
“And visually it was really interesting because (Sheila’s) in this dysfunctional marriage.
“And then the aerobics world is like this freedom and emancipation. It was great to be so specific about that without making fun of it and letting it feel authentic.”
Byrne sees the aerobics in the 1980s as the beginning of today’s wellness era where “everyone’s a guru on Instagram, everybody’s got their platform all set”.
Annie Weisman, who wrote and created Physical, acknowledged that the existence of female exercise gurus didn’t exist until “certain women blazed the trail” all those decades ago.
One the most known role models in this field – back then, and even today – is Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda, whose workout series have sold more than 17 million copies worldwide.
Weisman, who grew up in California, is well aware of this change that took place in the 1980s centring on aerobics.
Hence, with Physical, Weisman fused the message that it was important for women to accept their bodies and build their strength physically and emotionally.
Let’s be honest
One of the ways Weisman does this is by providing access to Sheila’s inner thoughts, which audiences hear in a voice-over done by Byrne.
It doesn’t pull any punches either. Sheila’s internal monologue is given a loud, clear and sometimes vicious voice – which is intriguing and, at the same time, unnerving.
Weisman said that Sheila’s internal monologue was the starting point of Physical.
“The show for me was to accurately express the disconnect between what a lot of us project to the world and how we’re feeling inside.
“It was kind of the high wire act of the show that inspired me to start writing in the first place.”
According to Weisman – who has penned other women-centric dark comedies like Suburgatory, Dead Like Me and Desperate Housewives – one of the first challenges she set for herself in writing Physical was to be really honest.
This, she said, meant digging into her own background, and “excavating some areas of my life that I had been scared to go into before” including an eating disorder.
She explained: “I really wanted to convey what it felt like for me in the most difficult phase of my own struggle where I felt so divided that there was a place where that contained a lot of really shameful self-criticism and hatred. And it just kept self-perpetuating.
“But what I found was that when I wrote about things that I was worried about, or ashamed of, it was really liberating. It really connected me to others.
“So, it was really just about kind of peeling away and digging deep.
Keeping things truthful paid off as Byrne and everyone on set, as well as in the post-production team, related to what Sheila was thinking.
But just because they understood, didn’t mean it was easy.
“It was uncomfortable. It was always uncomfortable, ” Byrne recalled to StarLifestyle about finding the tone when doing the voice-over.
“That’s how Annie wrote it, and I had to find my way in there. I had to figure it out. It was a process. But that’s what it’s about – it’s about being in someone’s head. It’s the human condition, and it’s very honest.
“And for women, it’s not always safe to say what we think; it’s just not, still isn’t. And so, it’s a space that we really inhabit with Sheila, ” said Byrne.
Actor Rory Scovel, who plays Sheila’s husband on the show, seconded Byrne. He told StarLifestyle: “I’ve watched this show with other women who say, ‘I talked to myself like that’.
“And it’s heartbreaking because you don’t want people to treat themselves that way.”
Let’s inspire others
Scovel, 40, said that while doing the show, it occurred to him that there are still many things in the world that haven’t changed especially when it comes to gender equality.
“When you step into this role, and you do the scenes, there’s a part of you that wants to go, ‘Well, this is 1981 so that was then’.
“But there is (another) part of you that goes ‘Yeah, but this is still how things are...’ at least with the inequality between men and women.
“The expectation of who they are in the workplace or who they are at home or what their body image is supposed to be and how much that affects people mentally, it’s disturbing.
“But you just hope that people are waking up to realise like, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t be like that’. You hope with a show like this, it makes them more aware, ” he said.
That is the intent, Weisman concurred.
According to her, despite Physical’s dark narrative, the show is actually about one woman’s desperate attempt to claw her way out of a bad place that she’s stuck at.
Hopefully, Weisman said, viewers will find their inner strength through Sheila’s struggle.
She elaborated to StarLifestyle: “I hope that women can recognise in themselves, how Sheila feels divided so often, between what’s expected of her and how she feels.
“And really, I think, the main thing is watching her kind of go from pretending to be content in just one role – in a really diminished role (next) to her husband – to kind of embracing that part of her that wants more than that.
“I hope that’s inspiring to women who feel like they may have a voice inside them that they’re afraid is threatening or unappealing.
“Because from my own experience, when I stopped beating myself up with my inner voice, and I started kind of releasing it in the world, it was really freeing.”
Physical premieres June 18 on Apple TV+ with three episodes. Subsequent episodes will be released every Friday.
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