Rose Byrne’s back seized up after filming “The Good Daughter”: ‘I couldn’t get out of bed for two days’

Jessica ShawFri, November 13, 2026 at 5:51 PM UTC

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Rose Byrne as Sam Quinn in ‘The Good Daughter’Credit: Mark Hill/PEACOCKKey Points -

Rose Byrne took her role on The Good Daughter very seriously.

Byrne plays Sam Quinn, who suffers a Traumatic Brain Injury when she’s young.

The actress enjoyed the physicality of the role, even if it led to an injury of her own.

While filming The Good Daughter, Rose Byrne may have taken the work-ethic idiom “Put your back into it” a little too seriously.

In the Peacock limited series, based on Karin Slaughter’s best-seller, Byrne plays Sam Quinn, who winces when she walks, limps, and struggles going up and down stairs. After being estranged from her sister Charlie (Meghann Fahy) for years, she is summoned by their father (Brendan Gleeson) and returns to the fictional town of Pikeville, Ga., cane in hand.

As younger children, Sam, Charlie, and their mother Gamma (Olivia Williams) are brutally attacked, which sets the stage for everything that later happens in the series. After telling her little sister to run and taking the brunt of the attack, Sam is left for dead in the rural Georgia forest. She survives, though lives with a Traumatic Brain Injury, vision issues, and the limp.

Meghann Fahy as Charlie Quinn and Rose Byrne as Sam Quinn in ‘The Good Daughter’Credit: Mark Hill/PEACOCK

Byrne completely committed to the precise physicality of playing a character with mobility issues. “I worked with a PT person, a trainer who was fantastic, who works in rehab with people who’ve had injuries and trauma, and we figured out how she would walk and what that looks like, what it looks like going upstairs, downstairs, all those sorts of things,” she says. “I mean, all those traits are really fun as an actress to get to delve into.”

Well, it’s fun until you’re on vacation in Australia two months after wrapping and all of a sudden… “My back! It seized up,” she says. “I couldn’t get out of bed for two days because I’d had some trauma to it from the work I’d done.”

“I had to go and get all this body work and [the person working with her] was like, ‘What have you been doing?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I was doing a limp.’”

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She explained the role to him and how she was limping on set as Sam every day for two months. “And he said that if you want to change something in your body, you do it every day for two months. Isn’t that interesting?”

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Byrne’s back recovered and a year later, she can almost laugh about it. Fahy, on the other hand, has thoughts. “It’s devastating,” she says, consoling her costar.

But then she ponders what the body worker said and has another thought: “If you do crunches every day for eight weeks,” she says. “That’s how you get abs!”

The Good Daughter is now streaming on Peacock.

on Entertainment Weekly

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”