Steve Carell knew from the moment he read alongside Charly Clive that she was the right person to play his daughter in the new HBO series “Rooster.”
“I never felt like Charly was auditioning. It just felt like two actors having a go at a scene,” he remembers in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room earlier this week. “I thought, ‘Well, we’re done.’”
For Clive, the Zoom call would have been enough. “I was like, at the very least I’ve met Steve Carell,” she says.
Now they play Greg and Katie Russo in the series, which premiered Sunday. Greg is the best-selling author of a series of airport novels featuring a swaggering hero called Rooster. Katie is a professor of art history. When he arrives on her campus to give a talk, she’s in the midst of an emotional tailspin: Her husband (Phil Dunster of “Ted Lasso”), a fellow faculty member, cheated on her with a graduate student. Now they are together and she’s adrift. Greg, seeing his daughter flail, decides to do whatever he can to help.
“Rooster,” created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, has what is now Lawrence’s signature mix of character drama and goofy comedy with a touch of uplift. Carell and Clive got together on the day of their New York premiere to discuss their father-daughter pairing.
Steve, how did this project come to you?
Steve Carell: I got a call from Bill Lawrence. Invited me to lunch with his partner, Matt Tarses, and they pitched this idea. It was a very broad idea. There were very few specifics.
What was the broad idea?
Carell: The bullet point was the father-daughter relationship. I wouldn’t even call it a pitch because he wasn’t pitching me. He was inviting me to be a part of this. The three of us all have adult daughters around the same age so, thematically, we all understood what was at stake. [Laughs] They went away and wrote a pilot. He would check in, and we’d talk about certain components. But mostly, he and Matt just went off and wrote it. And then several months later, I received the pilot script and thought it was fantastic.
Charly, you’ve only worked in the U.K., how did you get involved?
Charly Clive: Well, I got an email from my agent saying, “We’d love to have you submit a tape for this thing.” And it was called, at the time, “Untitled Steve Carell Project.” I almost didn’t care what the script was like. I was like, “I just want to do a tape that Steve Carell might one day see.” Then I read the script, and I was like, “I’m going to be really sad if I don’t get this, but I know I won’t get this because it’s so far out of where I am in my career.” Then I didn’t hear anything for a while, and I was like, “Well, that’s how it goes.” I got a call, and my agent was like, “Bill Lawrence would like to have you on a Zoom and have you read again.” And I was like, “Oh my God. That’s great.” And he was like, “They’re trying to figure out Steve’s schedule.” And I was like, “Huh?” Hung up and paced around my room and was like, “What do I do? This is so crazy.” So obviously I tidied my entire bedroom because I knew the Zoom was going to face out. And then we met at 10 p.m. that night, my time.
Our final Zoom, I was at my friend’s wedding, and it was the rehearsal dinner. We’re in the middle of nowhere in the north of England in an old manor house where her wedding was. I was supposed to make a speech, but I was like, “I’m really sorry. I have to go on this Zoom. It might be the most important Zoom I ever go on.” And she was like, “No worries.” She got into her rehearsal dinner, and she was like, “Guys, just so everyone knows, everyone has to get off the WiFi because Charly needs it. And we all have to talk at a whisper.” So she had her rehearsal in a whisper so that these guys didn’t have to hear speeches being made.
Carell: I didn’t know that. Wow.
Clive: She was like, “You better get that role.”
Steve, what was important for you to show about this relationship between a father and an adult daughter with both of them still going through growing pains?
Carell: I think there are a lot of cliches that you can lean into about that relationship, and I think that Bill and Matt avoided those. I mean, some are cliches because they are true: Overbearing fathers trying to dictate what’s best for their children. I get that side of it, and it’s fodder for comedy, for sure. But at the same time, I think they tried to draw this relationship in a very real way. What sparked my interest was that they’re both going through things. It looked at both of their perspectives in terms of this relationship, in terms of what they were going through. And in a lot of ways, they have parallel problems, and they’re dealing with them differently. Even though he’s much older, he’s not necessarily wiser in some ways, and he’s going to learn from her. She’ll learn from him.
We meet Katie at an incredibly low point. How did you get your head around that, Charly?
Clive: I think a lot of women on TV recently have been sort of messy, and that can be really great. And I also sometimes feel like that’s not super accurate. I think that men sometimes are allowed to be funny in the mess. And women can be a bit more tragic.
The thing I really like about Katie is she really doesn’t want to be the victim of anything. To be vulnerable, to her, feels like weakness. Then her dad comes crashing in, who is a vulnerability cheerleader, and is really encouraging her to feel your feelings, which is such an important thing. I’m close to my dad, and my dad is, I would also say a vulnerability cheerleader, and a very refreshingly emotional Englishman. There’s not too many of them. It’s really nice to see people encourage people to feel things and also to say it’s OK to feel things. I think they’re both kind of coming of age. It’s a nice time to meet people who on paper have their s— together and very quickly realize they don’t.
How did you start to figure out each other’s rhythms?
Carell: We just had a vibe to begin with. It was very easy. We never talked about it that much. It didn’t feel very actor-y. In terms of the father-daughter dynamic, I immediately felt very protective of her just in general. Partly because she was new to L.A. and new to this. We were on the Warner Brothers lot. Very Hollywood-y. I wanted her to know that she’s not only welcome here, but appreciated and celebrated, and this is where she should be. But I can understand, having gone through it, it’s daunting.
Charly, what were your Steve Carell touchstones?
Clive: Well, it was such a relief to actually meet Steve in real life on the first day when we did the read through because you build up such a picture and an idea of somebody. And I’m going to get emotional —
Carell: And I’m so disappointing.
Clive: So disappointing. No, Steve’s also a huge hero of my dad’s, my non-TV dad. So, the whole way through the process, me and my dad have been like, “This is the wildest thing ever.” Obviously, I grew up watching “The Office,” and I’ve been completely enamored by it and really like, that’s a comfort show that got me through COVID. But one of my top five films of all time is “Little Miss Sunshine,” which just blows me away. I watch it every year around my birthday because I think it’s just a remarkable film, and I completely love it. Your performance in that is insane. It’s so beautiful. To then walk into a room and meet him was crazy. And I was like, play it cool, play it cool, play it cool. I think that one of the first things I said to you was, “I’m really scared.” And Steve was like, “Yeah, me too.” It made me laugh, and I was like, “Oh, we’re going to be fine.”
Steve, you’ve jumped around tones a lot recently, doing a dark drama like “The Patient” and Chekhov on Broadway. Why was this emotional but comedic area something you wanted to play in now?
Carell: It was more about Bill than anything because “The Patient,” I wanted to do that because I was a fan of the creators of “The Americans.” I don’t have a master plan to answer your question. [“Rooster”] feels fairly lived in. It’s fun to play with different aspects of that as an actor to make a left turn into something that’s a little more tragic maybe after something that’s been just ridiculous. It’s just a fun exercise to have some pretty big, broad, physical comedy, but then go very grounded in the next moment with something else.
You do have some great moments of physical comedy. How do you think about playing those scenes?
Carell: I just think about somebody like Peter Sellers who just excelled at that. And to me, watching somebody like that, who can do the broadest physical comedy, but at the same time be oddly a human being and somebody that you relate to. You never got the sense that Peter Sellers was winking at the camera or that it was Peter Sellers. It was Clouseau, or whichever character he was playing, who was trying to maintain his dignity and failing miserably but trying to hold on to a sense of self and composure while everything is crumbling. That to me is really funny, if you believe it. If you think … “Oh boy, this actor thinks they’re doing something hilarious.” I’m out. That doesn’t make me laugh.
Charly, Phil Dunster gets to keep his British accent here, but you don’t. Was that hard?
Clive: The only time I slightly worried about my accent was when I was doing scenes with Phil because it’s too easy to get comfortable. Also because lots of my scenes with Phil are me giving him a bollocking or getting really angry with him. When you’re emotional, sometimes the accent slips again, but I loved it. I love doing an accent. I think that comes slightly from having a comedy background because we’re always doing accents and wearing silly hats and trying desperately to have people laugh. And my mum’s Mexican American, so I’ve grown up hearing the accent constantly and mimicking.
Steve, how did you think about Greg’s alter ego, Rooster, the star of his books?
Carell: My instinct was to not make Greg a nebbish, because I didn’t want it to be Walter Mitty. I didn’t want it to be this person who’s a complete introvert, nerd, not of this world, fantasizing about being this superhero. Because I thought that seems like such a trope. I feel like he’s got a lot going for him. He’s a smart guy. He’s intelligent. He’s pretty funny.
He’s sort of a heartthrob on campus once he gets there.
Carell: Well, I don’t think he sees it that way, but he kind of likes it that people might say that. I feel like he’s a fairly put-together guy. There has to be a reason why the woman who married him married him, [Katie’s mom, played by Connie Britton], because she is a force of nature and really smart, and there has to be something about him that is formidable as well, that is appealing. So I tried to lean into that aspect of it. He’s not fully formed. He’s got some rough edges, but I think there’s self-awareness too. He knows where most of his faults lie. He’s just not sure about the path to get better. That to me felt like part of his journey right from the top in terms of that Rooster character and what that signifies to him.
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