Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen star in the new Apple TV+ comedy series, Platonic, as Sylvia and Will, two close friends who often bicker and swear at each other.
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Partners and Projects
Byrne told PEOPLE about her real-life relationship with Rogen. “We’re far more kind with one another. We’re from the Commonwealth! He’s Canadian; I’m Australian. We don’t have that front-footedness that the characters necessarily have.”
Byrne, 43, and Rogen, 41, have been friends for years and have a great relationship. They worked together on the 2014 comedy Neighbors and its 2016 sequel Neighbors 2, playing a married couple living in the suburbs whose lives are disrupted when a college fraternity moves in next door. Byrne asked Rogen to be part of the project, Platonic.
Byrne talked about how the show “lives and dies on the friendship and the chemistry of the two people. And I knew that it had to be Seth [to play Will]. And it just was a question of whether he would or not, and convince him, but he was immediately on board, so it was wonderful.”
Sylvia, a lawyer-turned-housewife, is happily married to Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), a dependable attorney. When Sylvia learns that her former best friend Will is getting divorced, she reconnects with him and they start to get up to their old activities together like drugs, clubs, and bars. As expected, this doesn’t sit too well with Charlie.
On and Off Screen
Byrne has chatted a bit about what it felt like to go from playing spouses in Neighbors to friends in Platonic. “The dynamic is just intuitive. And we realized that day one, like, ‘Oh, yeah, all right. We can do these things, but we can’t do these things.’ It was an opportunity to discover different ways to find the comedy.”
She went on to discuss her initial feelings about the show’s script. “I have a dear friend who is a guy, and we’ve been friends since [we’ve been in] our twenties,” she says. “We were roommates in L.A. as struggling actors. And we are still very close, although he’s in Australia and I’m over here [in the U.S.]. But it was extraordinary, because we lived together for many years and people could never believe that we were platonic friends. Particularly on his side. All his friends were like, ‘Yeah, but what do you mean?’ And so when they pitched this idea to me of the show, I did feel I could relate.”