Note: This story contains spoilers from “Rooster” Season 1, Episode 1.
Bill Lawrence’s new HBO comedy “Rooster” introduces viewers to the loving yet dysfunctional father-daughter relationship between Steve Carell’s Greg and Charly Clive’s Katie, which luckily, is not what goes up in flames at the end of the premiere episode.
The series opener sees Greg, the author of the “Rooster” series, head to the campus of a Northeast college as a guest speaker, not so much to progress his own career, but more so to check in on his daughter, whose husband’s affair with a grad student is the talk of the town. Both Greg and Katie navigate their own misadventures on campus, but the end of the episode sees Katie’s life get a turn for the worse when husband, Archie (Phil Dunster) tells her he got the grad student (Lauren Tsai) pregnant. And if things couldn’t get worse, Katie accidentally burns down Archie’s house.
“It’s a lot of things to come back from, isn’t it?” Clive joked. “There’s an unplanned pregnancy, there’s a fire, there’s a divorce on the cards, and it’s a comedy — all of that’s happening in the first episode of a comedy.”
Even so, Clive noted there could be a path for reconciliation for Katie and Archie, saying “People make crazy decisions.” “I think Archie and Katie could go a number of different ways and and all of them will be bad,” she said.
As Katie navigates what’s next for her after that reveal, Greg finds himself back in college, experiencing the same parties and unexpected hookups as students in their early twenties — which creates some awkward situations for the father-daughter duo. Carell and Clive unpack it all below.
TheWrap: What first drew you both to this project?
Carell: Bill Lawrence. I’ve been a fan for a long time, and when he contacted me and expected expressed a desire to work together, I was completely into it.
Clive: For me, it was every part of it, really. It was Steve Carell. It was Bill Lawrence. That combo seemed amazing, and I thought when I saw that they were working together, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is so cool. Has this happened before?” And it hadn’t so I was like, “Oh, I’d love to get in on that.”
Carell: Was that the worst response ever? We were like “because we wanted to do it!”
Steve, as Charly mentioned, it’s the first time you and Bill have worked together. What was it like crafting this initial collaboration?
Carell: I worked briefly with John [C. McGinley] a while back, but I hadn’t worked with any of the cast and it was effortless. I felt like it was one of those shows that every scene was like, “that’s going to [work].” After the first scene with everyone in the cast [I] was like, “Oh, this is going to be a delight,” because everyone was great, just technically great actors across the board, super nice people, generous, gracious, like, “Ah, this is going to be a dream.” And it really was — all 10 episodes — the time flew by, and we were all sad it was over. It was really, really fun, absolutely easy to build. It’s easy to build chemistry with people who are are kind.
How did you build that father-daughter relationship?
Charly: The audition process was quite a lot of Zooms, and I thought that would be quite hard and scary, because you can’t really gauge who someone is on a Zoom, but we did a lot of them, and I think we slotted into something quite quickly, and they were really fun — those can be really tedious, and they weren’t tedious. And then when we met in person, and we got to actually do the real-life playing of the scenes, we had a bit of a basis. It just became really fun and finding it and developing it during the filming process. It was easy and quick and quite silly most of the time.
What was your favorite part about portraying that dynamic?
Carell: Charly’s such a good actor that, to me, that exploration and finding things together — because sometimes you enter a scene and you’re not exactly sure, and there’s not a ton of prep time for a show like this — It’s not like a film where you can have months to think about a certain scene. A lot of it has to be on the fly. Some pages have been written fairly recently or changed — so to be in that environment together, and be finding it together and trusting one another, I think that, to me, was the most exciting thing, and building that father-daughter dynamic, which wasn’t it wasn’t difficult at all.
I would feel, during scenes, she’d break my heart in scenes and make me laugh and none of it felt forced … I’m actually getting a little emotional thinking about it. It was really the lovely experience, because it felt very real. It felt very true.
Clive: I completely agree. I think it felt very real … it was nice, because sometimes it was quite emotional. And Greg and Katie do, as the series go on, really talk about some hard stuff and confront each other, and they just want to love each other so much, but they make it quite difficult for each other at times. It was nice because, within all of that, we also had a lot of really silly, funny things that we were able to do — we would go from a scene where we were having kind of a fight in a corridor to one where Steve’s falling over or running away in a funny way. And there was lots of every day — you had the light in the shade, which made it really fun, and also it made the relationship develop really quickly, because we did it. We went through it very it was a baptism of fire, I would say, in a really lovely way.
“Rooster” premieres Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.
