Note: This story contains spoilers from “Rooster” Season 1, Episode 5
By Episode 5 of Bill Lawrence’s HBO comedy “Rooster,” the love triangle between Charly Clive’s Katie, Phil Dunster’s Archie and Lauren Tsai’s Sunny has only gotten worse, with Katie and Archie secretly hooking up while Sunny balances her pregnancy with a career on the horizon.
Things come to a head when Sunny addresses the elephant in the room and apologizes to Katie for the affair, admitting she “f–ked up [her] life and blew up every plan [she] had for [her] own.” The scene, which Tsai notes was tense and awkward but also funny, not only gives Katie a chance to rail on Sunny for blowing up her marriage, but also takes the control away from Archie, who’s been two-timing both women by this point.
“Before it was these two little islands happening, and Archie was able to say this to this person and that to this person,” Tsai told TheWrap, noting that Archie sees the confrontation from afar and runs away. “It’s interesting for her to take that agency into her hands, and that’s kind of the moment when Sunny, too, is starting to see the truth of Archie and pull back from him.”
The confrontation certainly took guts for Sunny, who Tsai notes often buries or brushes off her feelings of guilt regarding her relationship with Archie. “Her way of dealing with all this pressure, I think, is to intellectualize things and to try to take the emotion out of it,” Tsai said. “There are very obvious times where you could be like that is something horrible that she is engaging in, and there are other times where she is just doing the best she can under these insane circumstances that she has been pulled into, not completely willingly.”
Getting involved with a married man only adds to the “immense amount of pressure” she’s facing as a grad student, but Tsai noted a handful of that moral complexity should be on Archie, rather than Sunny.
“I don’t think she would see herself as the other woman — I feel like she is a little bit more of the mind of … he was the one who was in the marriage at the time,” Tsai said. “I don’t know that she thought it through completely, nor did she think she was going to end up pregnant.”
Even so, Sunny has rolled with the punches, with Tsai noting, “She had this whole life for herself planned out of what she was going to do in her career and her academic life … it’s interesting how that shifts everything immediately, and she embraces it.”
For Tsai, whose credits include “Moxie” and “Legion,” the opportunity to work alongside such comedic greats is not taken for granted, nor is landing the role in the first place.
“In the in the email I got, I knew who some of the ensemble was going to be, and I was like, ‘This is insane. There’s no way,’” Tsai recalled. “But I went in for the audition and I was able to read the pilot, and I just felt like it was going to be amazing, and there’s no way it couldn’t have been.”
“Rooster” premieres Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.
