After ‘Ted Lasso,’ Phil Dunster Thought He Knew How to Redeem an Asshole. Then Came ‘Rooster’

[This post contains spoilers from the first season finale of Rooster]

Phil Dunster has a history with “assholes” — his word, not mine — in Bill Lawrence comedies. The English star broke out with his Emmy-nominated turn in Ted Lasso as the cocky and often misguided footballer Jamie Tartt, tracing a tricky arc from hotshot loudmouth to humbled team player over three hugely popular seasons. When Lawrence invited him back for Rooster, which concluded its first season on HBO on Sunday night, he presented a very different kind of character: a brilliant professor with a different accent and a more complex worldview. But one thing remained the same: He was kind of a prick. 

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Over the first season, though, Archie digs himself into a deeper and deeper hole — far from Jamie showing glimmers of self-improvement by this point in Lasso’s run, the Rooster finale leaves our sort-of antagonist more miserably self-involved than ever. He turns his back on grad student Sunny (Lauren Tsai), with whom he’s having a child, to reunite with his estranged wife Katie (Charly Clive), whom he’d left after cheating on her with Sunny in the first place. Katie fully catches on to his selfish game, though, and firmly rejects him at last. By the time Archie tries to win Sunny back, with nowhere else to turn, she’s gone too. 

For the generally warmhearted comedy of Rooster, it’s an awfully fine line to walk — to keep Archie believably terrible, while also just charming enough to make spending time with him more entertaining than irritating. Fortunately, this is a kind of specialty for Dunster. 

You had a very fine line to walk all season on Rooster. What did you make of where we leave Archie in the finale? 

I just watched it with my mother-in-law. Every single time we finish a scene with Arch, she keeps saying to me, “Well, you’re going to be nice to me during the next scene, aren’t you?” Each time, it feels like there is an olive branch that’s left out for Archie to grab hold of, but he just doesn’t. He fumbles it each time.

He’s now at rock bottom because all of his bravado, all of his charm and charisma are null and void. Both of his seemingly viable options have now told him to fuck off. He’s stuck. He’s totally scraped the barrel and been found out. He’s had such a public breakdown of these two relationships, I wonder where we will find him at the start of season two. It’s been a tricky tone. I tried to bring some of that Jamie Tartt in this show; [creator Bill Lawrence] thought I could do douchebag-y things whilst trying to maintain some semblance of you being on his side a little bit. It was just trying to find that balance.

There’s a moment at the end of Ted Lasso season one where we see some hope for Jamie — a flash of the shift that we know comes. We don’t quite get that here. 

It’s about maintaining that sense of trajectory and making us feel like we never go too far with him, too far into a place [where] we can’t then get it back. He’s really toeing that line. The feedback, really, that I am aware of, mostly from my mother-in-law, who’s terrified that I’m going to turn out to be a horrible person, is that you, as an audience member, really want to like him, but he’s just desperate to make it as hard as possible. It is an interesting line, and it is a really fun line. It’s always more exciting to play. When you look at people like Tim Curry and Alan Rickman, there’s a great history of British actors playing baddies. We quite enjoy being the antagonist a little bit for some reason. There’s a playfulness, there’s a twinkle in the eye, there’s a sort of tongue in the cheek to that sort of tradition. 

Do you worry about unlikability at all?

I suppose not from moment to moment for a character. I don’t mind that because it gives you somewhere further to go. It also is often more fun because there’s tension between what the righteous path is and what this character’s decision is. Also, I think that, I don’t know, it’s not up to me. All I can do, without sounding too highfalutin, is serve the text, serve the character, serve whatever’s honest to what the director needs from me in that moment. It’s trusting in them that it’s not all one-dimensional, it’s all part of more of a kaleidoscope of what makes this person. I don’t mind it because it just adds texture, hopefully. (Pause) But yes, I worry all the time, sure.

It’s a unique place to be in, on these popular shows where you’re handed these characters who are initially working in opposition to our protagonist. Did you learn how you like to navigate that personally, from Ted going into Rooster?

Oh yeah. Trying to find charm and not having malevolence as the intention, not trying to be evil, let the brilliant writing do that. Trying to play the opposite of what the scene is suggesting, where the character goes, without adding any affectations — can you smooth off the edges a little bit? To answer your question again of “Am I worried about unlikability?,” I want to feel like it’s a part of that trajectory, that there will be some redemption — that these people are complicated and it feels real even in these slightly heightened shows. Something I think that Bill Lawrence shows do really, really well, even in the more heightened comedies that he has, is show people in their entirety. When we see redemption, when we see them make the right decisions, it’s not in a vacuum — we see that they’ve had to struggle with making bad decisions because we all do that. And so in terms of the fear of unlikability, actually, I think no, not really — it should be there in order to then give you further to go. The payoff can be even more exciting.

You were also in your twenties when Ted Lasso started. How do you reflect on introducing yourself as an actor, essentially, to so many viewers through that character and that massive growth arc? 

It was so exciting for me because he was so different from me. Cool hair, cool accent, very good at football. I felt very grateful for the fact that it allowed me to work in a very different kind of character space than I normally would. That’s really what I want to do going forward, is to have variety to step into as many different shoes as I can. Whilst Archie probably is, unfortunately, slightly closer to me in a few ways — less cool dress sense, similar accent, far smarter than I’ll ever be — I still find there’s plenty of nuance there away from Jamie. I want to continue finding a sort of patchwork quilt of a career. I look at an actor like Oscar Isaac, and I feel like he’s got such an amazing plethora of very different roles, also different mediums.

I just feel incredibly grateful to Ted for that time in my life. It changed all of our lives, really. There’s 1,000,001 things that are out there to take people’s attention, and the fact that it sort of actually felt like it made a splash — it’s so nice to be in things that people seem to actually give a shit about. Fucking hell, that was lucky.

I imagine when viewers don’t realize what your accent actually is as an actor, that’s a great starting point too.

Once people get over the disappointment that I’m actually not like Jamie and don’t sound like him, then I’m just a sort of dull boy from Reading. It’s quite nice to feel like it challenges a perception.

When you and I first spoke about Rooster, you mentioned doing a ton of reading up to play a professor, only for a lot of it to turn out to be unnecessary after Bill told you the actual subject Archie would be teaching. Did you gain anything generally, though, absorbing so much as you were stepping into the skin of this very outwardly brilliant person? 

Oh, absolutely. If nothing else, getting to learn about the history of a place like Russia was incredible. The sheer scale and extraordinary feat that it was to create a country like Russia, I think, would be incredibly inspiring to Archie. When you look at someone like Peter the Great, Archie would be absolutely fascinated by a historical figure like that: someone who absolutely revolutionized Russia, who was fascinated by naval adventures. He was a domineering force. He expanded Russia’s territories, created St. Petersburg, one of the greatest cities of the time. There was a sense of an extraordinary person and so many extraordinary people doing quite awful things throughout the year.

I don’t think he just blindly deifies these people. There is something of one of the greats that Archie probably self-aggrandizingly models himself off, slightly. It was just really helpful to see whether he does or not. The sheer vastness of the country, the sheer vastness of the history of the culture of a person like Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, these optimists, I think that he loves. He fell in love with that a little bit. Also, the brilliance of Tolstoy and Chekhov and Dostoevsky, these geniuses that have gone down in history. He is inspired by that. It was absolutely futile in the sense that it was never used, exactly — the level of my folly was actually quite hilarious, the hubris was extraordinary — but that being said, I still got so much from that. I got into the mindset of Archie, a little bit of the grandiose nature of these people that he was spending a lot of time with in his studies. He’s like, “Yeah, I guess I could be Archie the Great.”

Did you have any rooting interest in what Archie would actually do or choose? There’s this huge responsibility with Sunny that he’s not taking especially seriously, and his obvious love for Katie, whom he really takes for granted. No option is perfect here, right?

The opposite of every single thing that he does, probably. (Laughs) You just keep digging. I wonder how far back I would have to go to feel comfortable to go, okay, “This is the point where…” It’s a slippery fish that just keeps jumping and I guess you have to go as far back as quite early on —  his phrase that Sonny “becomes impregnated” — where he’s trying to distance himself from it. There’s maybe a lesson of responsibility and culpability, learning when to hold his hands up and say, “I’ve gone too far.” He really should have done it quite early on, but where he is at now — well, it’s maybe never too late to apologize, but I’m fascinated to see where we find him at the start of season two because we’ve really given him lots and lots of rope with which to hang himself, to use too glib a bit of imagery. But he has such a capacity for brilliance. I would love to see him weasel his way out to find some semblance of peace for himself and for others. 

There needs to just be a sense of, before anything really changes — because there also may well be a world where we see him go even further. He could dig his heels in because men in positions of power digging their heels in and failing to accept responsibility is really en vogue these days and those people often get rewarded for it. Maybe he’s a product of the Western way these days, unfortunately.

Let me ask you about Ted Lasso season 4. I know you’re neither confirming nor denying appearing in the show. But as that door seems open, I’m curious about how you reflect on where we left Jamie in season 3? That felt like a very complete arc to me and yet, of course, people want to see him back. 

He’s a fascinating character. I understand the argument that one might want to see more of him because he’s just at the beginning of this self-knowledge journey. That’s a testament to the fact that these guys have written a really fucking complex character in a comedy where people also enjoy hearing him say silly words in his accent. I would’ve loved to have done more. That being said, I also fully back the fact that [the writers] set out to tell the story in three seasons, and I think they did. They got to that place where it’s better to die the hero than stick around to become the villain. I hope that there was enough semblance of getting out when the right time was getting out at the right time. 

There’s loads of stuff to do, and I’ve been in plenty of shows before that nobody really cares about, and that’s fine. I understand that’s just the way of the world. But to have people come up and say — and for me really to believe this — they’re on their 17th time of watching the show, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s kind of magic. If that’s where we leave it, then so be it. 

Bill has spoken to me about writing in three-season plans with Rooster, too, even if it has the potential to expand beyond that, as Shrinking now is. Do you have a sense of how Archie’s arc is sketched out?

I have no idea other than: We are going to get it dark, and then we’re going to find the light at the end of the tunnel. Something that’s really interesting about Bill is he came up in network television, which I don’t really know that much about, but as I understand it, you pitch who the characters are and what the world is, and then you’d get greenlit off of that. Whereas with streaming, you sort of have to go, “Here’s the beginning, here’s the middle, here’s the end,” because we don’t know how long this is going to run for. It’s probably only going to be 10 episodes rather than 5,000 or however much it was they did back in the network days.

With Shrinking, Bill and Brett [Goldstein] are smart enough to be able to find really interesting stories for them where it doesn’t seem gratuitous to continue to keep the party rolling because we care about these people and the rich lives they have, so we can see more of them. I’d just be happy if we got to season three, to be honest, because I love doing the show. It’s worth saying that the audience would not forgive the show if suddenly you have the baddy, or at least someone who’s very complex in making bad decisions, suddenly turn it around. We need to earn it. We need to really earn that little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. But maybe there’s not any light at the end of the tunnel — maybe he’s just a fucking asshole.

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