Charly Clive, Breakout Star of HBO’s ‘Rooster,’ Is Just Getting Started
Charly Clive isn’t quite saying goodbye to those London comedy gigs just yet.
“There’s no world in which Rooster, even though it’s like the biggest job I’ve had, guarantees anything for me,” the 33-year-old muses to The Hollywood Reporter. “But there is absolute stability in some grotty basement or attic above a pub and 40 people on a Wednesday night coming to have a laugh. Comedy is always going to be a sticking point,” she adds, “because everything else is so by chance.”
We’re catching up over smoothies in Clive’s native London, where she’s lived since 2016, after around five years spent at the whim of New York City’s vibrant comedy scene. It might surprise some audiences to know the magnificently charming Clive — currently starring as Katie Russo, daughter of Steve Carell‘s Greg, whose yo-yo relationship with her (kind of) husband Phil Dunster provides the HBO series with some irresistible chemistry — is a Brit.
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Well, half a Brit. That impeccable U.S. accent is partly owing to her Mexican-American mother, a fact she believes has aided her seamless transition into an endearing East Coast college professor. It’s also been helped by a childhood spent worshipping American comedians — “Steve Martin is my North Star, but my compass is Steve Carell,” she’d later tell me — and fooling the conductors at her local Oxfordshire train station. “When I was a teenager, I would put on an American accent constantly to get out of buying a train ticket,” says Clive. She effortlessly slides into a twang not unlike Russo’s: “‘I’m so sorry. Oh my god, I literally don’t know how to do that!'” That knack for accents has come in very handy for lots of schemes, she adds.
The schemes that have brought her to the front and center of HBO are teeming with vim and variation. Toward the end of her stint in New York (she’d moved to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and, thanks to that U.S. passport, was able to stay in the city), Clive fell unwell. She was diagnosed with a benign tumor on her pituitary gland and had to move back to England. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s it for me,'” she says. “‘I guess I’m just a girl that got sick, and that’s sort of the most defining thing about me now.'”
When her best friend, Ellen Robertson — who you might recognize from recent Netflix hit Vladimir — suggested she make a comedy show out of her diagnosis, off they went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a routine called Britney in tow, named after Clive’s tumor, which in turn was named after pop icon Britney Spears. “My career started from there, and so did hers,” Clive says. They’d gig at comedy clubs around London and still do so once or twice a week if they’re both in the city.
Then came what Clive thought was to be her big break: Pure, a 2019 Channel 4 series in which she starred as 24-year-old OCD sufferer Marnie, who is plagued by some pretty disturbing, intrusive sexual thoughts. The role came after a long period of consecutive rejections. “My feedback was always like, ‘We’ve got five other people that look like you,'” Clive recalls. “I get it, I’ve got brown hair, but I also felt like I can do some cool stuff, actually, if someone would give me a chance. But I don’t feel like in those five-minute [or] half an hour meetings, anyone really gives you — particularly as a woman — a chance to be funny.”
While nanny-ing at the time for a family in Brooklyn, she was championed by a casting director she’d love THR to shout-out, Jane Ripley, and landed the lead part. But even with the witty, bold analysis of mental health and sexuality that Clive expertly executed in Pure — and another flawless accent, this time Scottish — it wasn’t picked up for a second season. “It was Channel 4 being complete cowards,” she says, reflecting on that call six years ago. “I think the reason was something quite bullshitty, like, ‘There’s just not really the space for it. We can’t deliver drama or comedy,’ and ‘Women’s mental health feels a bit difficult right now’ or something. It was something really, really crappy.” People still reach out to Clive to tell her how much the show helped them through their own OCD battles.
For the actress-writer-comedienne, it was a bit of a shock to the system. “I think people warn you a lot that you’re going to hear ‘No,’ but they don’t warn you that you’re going to hear ‘No’ after something that breakout of a role,” she says about Pure. “I do think it’s ultimately been a really good thing for me, because I’ve built a life that doesn’t rely on my acting career. And thank god, because it’d be a really weird life if I was just acting. These jobs come so few and far between. But after the second year of not really getting any work after Pure, people started asking me if I was still an actor. And I said, ‘No, I’m a writer.'”
The Rooster process started in October 2024. Clive was asked to submit a tape. “It was called Untitled Steve Carell project,” she remembers. “And then I read it was [created by] Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses and I was like, ‘Fuck! I wish I didn’t know!’ Because you couldn’t plan a better list of people to work with. I’m a comedy person, so I was raised by these men, basically.”
Up until this point, Clive had made peace with frequenting London’s comedy clubs and grotty basements. She dug deep and reminded herself of her comedy heroes. “Listen, it took a while for Steve Martin. It took a while for Steve Carell. If it takes a while for the Steves,” she tells THR, “maybe it takes a while for the Charlys. That’s okay with me.”
It wasn’t long after that first tape that she was doing a chemistry read with one of those Steves. “He, funnily enough, reminds me a little bit of my dad, which does help,” she says. “He was so calm, kind and quieter than I thought he would be. He asked me a few questions, really engaged with me as a person before we started. He’s such an easy, generous laugher. And when you make Steve Carell laugh, it’s just an extraordinary high that I will chase for the rest of my life.”
She didn’t confess her adoration for him until far later in the Rooster timeline, when they were on set together. But it was at a Vampire Weekend concert, at Brixton’s O2 Academy at the end of 2024, when Clive found out she’d landed the role. “I ran in, sort of like an emperor in ancient Rome, my friends looked at me worried, and I was, like, ‘Thumbs up, baby!'” Clive remembers. “We all went fucking nuts and I got absolutely, joyfully hammered.”
Lawrence had been warning Clive that she was a slightly hard sell. “Because nobody knows who I am, it felt like a risk, maybe, considering how stacked the cast is.” But he kept telling her: “‘We’re gonna do it. We’re gonna get you across the board.'” Everyone, including Carell, was in her corner. Even though the caliber of people auditioning was really high, Clive adds. Does she know who else read for Katie? “No, I never want to, because I know it would be women I’m obsessed with,” she says. “My Katie’s different to anyone else’s, and I’m glad that I got to do it, but there’s a parallel universe where somebody else is doing it, and it’s still my favorite show.”
The campus-set comedy follows Carell, an author whose famous character-led Rooster books have made him a popular figure at the fictional Ludlow College. He takes on a small faculty role to keep an eye on Katie, whose tumultuous personal life is unfortunately pretty wrapped up in her professional one. Also boasting Danielle Deadwyler, Lauren Tsai, Annie Mumolo, Rory Sovel, Alan Ruck, Connie Britton, and John C. McGinley, the show’s already been renewed for a season two after having become the network’s most-watched comedy premiere in over 10 years.
When asked what Rooster is about, Clive says she thinks it’s a lesson that the college experience never really ends. “You’re always trying to prove yourself to somebody, and it turns out the person you need to prove yourself to — and the person that loves you most — is yourself. From a personal point of view, I think the father-daughter relationship, that being the beating heart, really resonates with me. I’m close with my father, Steve is really close with his daughter, Annie, who’s heavenly — a huge compliment that I get to be compared to her. I think we see some really amazing stories of father and daughter against the odds, battling great demons, or going through huge loss,” she says, citing The Last of Us as an example of all of those extremities. “I don’t really think we see two people having a laugh and being like, ‘That’s who you are.’ It’s nice to see a show where a daughter is realizing that her dad is a person and not just the guy responsible for her well-being.”
That chemistry with Carell was pretty immediate. Clive takes various moments over the course of our interview to gush over the comedy legend, evidently still in awe of his talent, generosity, and humility. She is still in disbelief that she was sharing scenes with him on the Warner Bros. lot, and that he was nervous on their first day: “We’re both a bit shy, I think, or more introverted than maybe people would expect comedy people to be.” That first month of shooting was admittedly an emotional experience for her — Clive was going up against a little bit of the age-old imposter syndrome — and one particular scene left her feeling frustrated.
Carell noticed. He quietly told her: “‘I know you already know this, but just so you know, this is your show. It’s my show. It’s Phil’s show. It’s everybody’s, but it’s your show too. And if there’s anything you ever want to try and you want me to sort of get on board with it, if you need to run lines a bit more, if you want to meet up before and talk through the scene…'” Clive remembers. “He was like, ‘The best thing we can do here is have as much fun as possible, because that’s what’s got to translate in the show. Everyone wants to do a great job, but just remember that this is your show.’ And I was like, wiping away the tears, like, ‘Thank you.'” The interaction provided Clive with a critical confidence boost.
And then, of course, there’s her scenes with fellow countryman Phil Dunster, alum of Lawrence’s Ted Lasso. Early on, we find out his character Archie, a Russian history professor at the liberal arts school, has left Katie for Tsai’s graduate student Sunny, who has also wound up pregnant with his child. But Archie and Katie, still very much in love, are sleeping together again. The season finale, airing Sunday, will give audiences some much-needed closure on the love triangle.
Thankfully, Clive could really let loose around Dunster. The Brits were bouncing off one another the whole shoot, tapping into what she described as a “bantery, brother-sister chemistry.” So much so that Clive worried Lawrence and Tarses were not “gonna find what they needed to” between them. (Spoiler: They found it in abundance.) “I’m so glad, because Phil has become a really good friend, and we live really near each other in London, and we’re already planning that we want to try and be neighbors for season two [when the cast are back in L.A.]. And I don’t drive, and he does. I need a ride to work!”
On the status of their relationship, THR ponders how much Archie gets away with when it comes to Katie because he’s so handsome. Should she not just leave him in the dust? “He’s gorgeous,” Clive agrees, “and because he’s English in America, and that accent — let me tell you— it goes a long-ass way. Particularly in men because of Hugh Grant. He started it, he ruined it,” she jokes.
“I think you must make a bunch of really clever decisions to find the person that you’re supposed to be with,” she adds about Katie and Archie. “I think falling in love is deeply problematic. We should absolutely outlaw that phrase. But Katie fell in love with Archie. And so she’s recovering from a fall. You are going to backslide sometimes. And I think that my hope is that in season two, we get to see what that recovery looks a bit more like.” She hopes to develop Sunny and Katie’s relationship further, too, — “I would love there to be a caretaking or some sort of support [there]. Selfishly, because I love Lauren and I’d love to hang out with her more.”
“She has always seen herself as a girl next door, plain Jane, desperate to get out of her mother’s shadow,” continues Clive about Katie Russo. “And this man shining a light on her is huge. And we’re not taught as women, particularly, to prioritize the women in your life enough. If she’d gone and found a great group of girlfriends, they would have had sex a couple times, and then she would have been like, ‘That was fun, but he sucks.’ She wouldn’t have married him!”
And so it was with great relief that Clive learned Rooster is returning for a second season. She also has plans for total world domination alongside her bestie of 20 years, Robertson (the pair have just signed with WME), and will next be seen opposite Taron Egerton in Jonathan Schey’s Everybody Wants to Fuck Me, but was still swiftly humbled when she received the news. “On the Thursday, we got the news about the second season and I was like, ‘Here we go, baby, business class flights to Hollywood!’ And then on the Friday,” she adds, “I performed comedy to nine people.”
“I’ll never stop,” she says. She and Robertson are due back at the Fringe this August, and Clive hopes to wrangle her Rooster season two schedule around it. The specifics of Lawrence and Tarses’s next Rooster script remain unknown, but one thing’s for sure: Charly Clive — whether she knows it or not — has finally emerged a fully-fledged star.
Rooster is available to stream on HBO Max.
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