As one of TV comedy’s most established stars, Steve Carell gets sent a fair amount of scripts. Few have spurred him to an instant “yes” like Rooster, written by Bill Lawrence and his frequent collaborator Matt Tarses. “I read the script and it was one of the best comedy pilots I’ve read — period,” Carell tells The Hollywood Reporter in his first interview about the show. “Pilots are the hardest to write. You’re creating a world, you’re introducing it to an audience and you have to do it quickly, efficiently, without feeling like it’s all backstory — and be funny at the same time.” When he finished the first episode, he turned to his wife, Nancy Carell (who also guests in the show), and said, “I’m in.”
Lawrence has had this effect lately, fashioning signature mid-career roles for the likes of Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso), Jason Segel (Shrinking) and Vince Vaughn (Bad Monkey). When I observe that the creator is on a bit of a hot streak, the Office alum quips back: “Well now you’ve jinxed it.”
Lawrence too is feeling the pressure on this one: “We’re all doing this about our relationship with our daughters — and so if it sucked, on some level it might mean I’m a bad dad,” he says with a laugh.
At least HBO, which will launch the half-hour show on March 8, felt pretty confident from the jump. “It came at a time when we were rebuilding our slate — right as Curb [Your Enthusiasm] was ending, just after Barry and [The Righteous] Gemstones and Somebody Somewhere were about to wrap up — and it felt like it sat right in the space that we needed it to,” says HBO EVP Amy Gravitt, who heads up comedy for the network. “It gave us, finally, the chance to work with Bill, who we admired for some time, and the same goes with Steve. It was really a no-brainer as soon as we heard it was on the horizon.”
Rooster stars Carell as Greg Russo, a best-selling writer of popular, if hardly lauded, novels featuring a character who goes by, you guessed it, Rooster — and is the kind of guy his author wishes he could be more like, heroic and authoritative and less mired in the afterburn of divorce. He is based on Carl Hiaasen, with whom Lawrence and Tarses became friendly after adapting his book Bad Monkey for TV. “Even though he writes these great funny books, he has this little bit of an inferiority complex about it, when you start to talk about him in the same breath as ‘real’ authors,” Tarses says.
Greg is brought in to speak at the liberal arts college where his professor daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), is in the midst of a personal crisis: Her husband and colleague at the school, Archie (Phil Dunster), has been cheating on her with a grad student named Sunny (Lauren Tsai), and she, uh, burns his house down in retaliation. So Greg comes to an arrangement with the department’s eager dean (John C. McGinley): He’ll stick around as a guest lecturer if his daughter can stick around, too.
“The show itself is at least loosely based on the fact that Matt, Steve and I all have very tight relationships with our daughters who are young adults. That relationship’s complicated because you want to protect them, when the truth is that you’re just kind of protecting yourself,” Lawrence says. “We wanted to imagine what it would be like to drop a man-of-the-people author into his daughter’s claustrophobic life at a small liberal arts college in the East.”
Adds Carell, “I grew up on the east coast and I went to a college not unlike this, and the whole world felt very comfortable, just to me as a person.” It’s the kind of lived-in comic turn that Carell excels at, and that should put him in the conversation for his long overdue first Emmy win.
The father-daughter bond anchors Rooster, but it’s got its own workplace-sitcom vibes too — modern academia proves an expansive sandbox to play in. “Things have really changed in terms of the state of academia since we started writing in 2020,” says Tarses. “We wanted to play around a little bit with all these ideas of ‘woke’ and that stuff, just without a point of view. We all have kids in college and they’re all talking about this, yelling at us all the time about ways in which we are not aware of stuff.”
Like any Lawrence joint, Rooster also very quickly establishes itself as a robust, layered ensemble comedy. “Bill told all the actors at the first table read, ‘Within a couple of weeks, I want you all to have an exponentially greater percentage of ownership of your character,’” Carell says. “He invited people in to make the characters their own, to make them feel lived in and really breathe life into them…and each week the show changes and it gets a little more complex and a little more nuanced and the relationships become deeper and richer and funnier.”
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“There’s an art in casting, and Greg Daniels had the same knack on The Office as Bill,” Carell says. “He cast a bunch of people that just genuinely cared about each other and really enjoyed seeing each other every day and became real friends — not just work friends, but lifelong friends. That’s the same sense I got with this group.”
As ever, there’s a fascinating mix of Lawrence returnees (Dunster, McGinley) with newbies. Take Danielle Deadwyler, known as a dramatic heavyweight in award-winning projects like Till and The Piano Lesson, who gets to show off her goofier side here as Dylan, a poetry professor who becomes a wary confidante of Greg’s — and often steals the show. “That is an actor who can do anything,” Carell says. “She brings such a different energy to the show, a gravitas almost, while at the same time crushing every comedic moment she has. It’s pretty amazing.” Lawrence adds, “She’s reached a point in her career that she gets offers to do things, but she came in and read with Steve. It’s cool also when you find people that might not have done this before.”
Deadwyler loves comedy and leapt at the chance to prove herself in the format, having established herself in a very different lane. “I just remained patient and here it came,” she says. “It was the most fluid thing. It was so comfortable. It is a room of people who want you to excel from top to bottom, from audition to last day of shooting.” This went particularly for her juicy dynamic with Carell, which ranges from flirty to friendly to ever-so-slightly tense: “Steve has lived in a certain world and realm of projects and I’ve lived in a certain realm of projects. We came in together and as two people literally just trying to figure each other out. That helped when that was the impetus for these folks to come together.”
Deadwyler also comes from an academic background, so brought fresh insights into the world to the set each day: “I was like, ‘Yes, an institution, let’s go, I’m there!’ Then: ‘Oh, poetry professor, are you really talking to me? That’s me!’”
When it came to Dunster, similarly, he fit the role of Archie Bates like a glove — at least, as Lawrence saw it. “Bill said, ‘I’ve written a part, he’s an English guy, he was originally called Phil — and he’s an asshole, so I thought of you,’” Dunster says. Lawrence does not exactly counter this recollection: “Phil is very good at being a pretentious British antagonist,” he says.
Though the creator was surprised to hear Dunster’s dialectical take on the role. “He was like, ‘Hey, you okay if I speak in my normal voice?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but isn’t that your Ted Lasso voice?’” Lawrence says, referring to his breakout character Jamie Tartt. “He’s like, ‘No, man. That was me doing a Manchester accent.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, got it.’”
Most of the cast showed up in some combination of thrilled and nervous to work with Carell. Clive, taking on her first American TV role, admits to feeling a bit jittery at the first table read. Carell immediately broke the ice with his onscreen daughter. “In a Buggy, he took me around the Warner Bros. studio lot cause I’d never seen it before,” she recalls. “I wasn’t surprised at how kind he was because, you hope when you meet your hero, that they will be. But I was very glad that we were all right about him.” (Carell similarly can’t rave enough about Clive: “I think she’s a real find,” he says.)
“We were around each other all the time — even if we’re not in scenes together, we are in the makeup trailer together, or on the sort of stoops of our trailers or whatever — and everybody kept telling me how lucky we were to be able to be filming in LA,” Clive adds of how she felt the cast gel over time. “You feel like you are on a campus. You are eating your lunch together. It’s a lot less isolating.”
This might be one reason why the Rooster ensemble so organically broadens — the students take on larger roles, while everyone from the bumbling local cop (Rory Scovell) to Sunny’s oft-irritated roommate (Robby Hoffman) to the Dean’s perfectionist assistant (Annie Mumolo) starts snagging the spotlight. Many who spoke with THR highlight Mumolo’s scene-stealing work as a prime example of how the show came into its own.
“The role that we wrote was much more this classic executive-assistant, super organized and put together and runs her boss’s life, and to [casting director] Allison Jones’s credit, when Annie wasn’t quite that character, she said, ‘Maybe you rethink that character,’” says Tarses. “We resisted because we were lazy and we thought we were right — then we ended up having this character that is really one of my favorites in the show.”
Carell puts it more simply: “Just wait. She’s like a secret weapon. She’s unbelievable on the show.”
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Rooster feels built to last. Even a seeming villain like Dunster’s Archie gets intriguing shading over the course of the season. “We were given a lot of agency to take [the pilot script] and use that as a launchpad,” Dunster says. “For Archie, we could try to find why he is the way he is and not make him arch, as it were or Machiavellian. He’s just a dude with an ego problem.”
Lawrence has gotten pretty good at this gig. Scrubs launched 25 years ago, and over the eight original seasons, not much changed, exactly. “They once asked Zach Braff how much his character changed from year one to year eight, and he said, ‘In the eighth year, I think I had a beard,’” Lawrence recalls with a laugh. (It’s returning in a revival season later this month; expect more changes in that case.)
“And now with streaming, the cool thing is when I’ve sold these shows, I’ve pitched a beginning, middle, and end,” Lawrence continues. Which is to say, he tends to work in three-season chunks — though Ted Lasso is now coming back for a fourth season, Shrinking has already been renewed for season 4 (both are with Apple TV+), and there’s no telling how far Rooster will go. The goal, clearly, is a healthy run.
Ask Gravitt if she sees Rooster as a potential new long-running anchor point for HBO’s comedy slate, she replies quickly and enthusiastically: “Of course, yes, absolutely.” But when posed to Carell, who hasn’t been part of a long-running TV show since The Office — spoiler alert, both The Four Seasons and The Morning Show killed him off before continuing on without him — he demurs: “Oh my gosh, that I won’t even weigh in on.”
But he offers this, at least: “It was an incredible, wonderful experience. I’d be overjoyed to be able to do it again.”
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