{"id":643365,"date":"2026-03-09T14:36:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T14:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/643365\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T14:36:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T14:36:19","slug":"rooster-co-creator-bill-lawrence-on-college-setting-phil-dunster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/643365\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Rooster\u2019 Co-Creator Bill Lawrence On College Setting, Phil Dunster"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the pilot episode of Rooster<\/a> on HBO Max<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tBill Lawrence<\/a>\u2019s latest show Rooster, which he co-created with Bad Monkey collaborator Matt Tarses centers Ludlow College, a campus teeming with brilliant professorial minds and students eager to learn from them.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s Steve Carell<\/a>\u2019s character who bridges the gap between those two groups as Greg Russo, author of the famous Rooster beach read books, who comes to guest lecture at the school where his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) teaches. Greg is loosely inspired by Bad Monkey author Carl Hiaasen<\/a> as Lawrence previously told Deadline, and he never went to college.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe main thing we liked was the metaphor of, for me, nostalgically, college is where you went to reinvent yourself and decide who you wanted to be,\u201d Lawrence told Deadline. \u201cVery intentionally, we said, Steve\u2019s character never went to college. And why couldn\u2019t a guy in his late 50s use that as a place to decide what he wanted the rest of his life to look like? He could overcome some of the things holding him back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Scrubs and Spin City creator, great-great-grandson of William and Sarah Lawrence who founded Sarah Lawrence college, shared some of his personal background and experiences about higher education, which echoed a bit of what his Shrinking collaborator Harrison Ford shared in his Lifetime Achievement Actors Awards acceptance speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ll be candid. I was embarrassed about loving writing and storytelling and theater and all that stuff when I was in high school. I\u2019m ashamed of ever having been embarrassed,\u201d he said. \u201cI played a lot of sports. And I thought \u2018Oh, maybe it\u2019s not cool.\u2019 I don\u2019t know, and then college, you get there, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, sh-t, it\u2019s okay. Not only is it okay, but all the cool people are doing this stuff. So college is a place where young people get to go reinvent themselves and decide what direction they want to go with their life, if they\u2019re lucky enough to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTarses attended Williams, and star Carell played hockey at a small liberal arts school \u2014 Denison University in Ohio. Initial encounters with Professor Dylan Shepherd (Danielle Deadwyler) and President Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) at Ludlow tease the clash of old guard and new that is taking place on college campuses across America.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSteve Carell in \u2018Rooster\u2019 on HBO Max<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s very tricky, because we don\u2019t want to land in a political hotbed, right? And universities are all over the place, and so this definitely has a nostalgic vibe,\u201d Lawrence told Deadline. \u201cRight now, those campuses are very transitional, because, in a great way, it\u2019s time for a new guard in a lot of facets of American education and elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe academia and campus setting gives grounds for Lawrence and Tarses to assemble an ensemble of characters connected by their workplace as well as family ties when it comes to Greg, Katie and the university. The co-showrunners wanted to work with Phil Dunster<\/a>, balancing any similarities his character Archie might have with his Ted Lasso role Jamie Tartt to highlight the actor\u2019s skill of making an unlikeable character likeable, which applies to both the Manchester footballer and the Rooster Russiann studies professor, who is married to Greg\u2019s daughter Katie and who cheated on her with a grad student, Sunny (Lauren Tsai).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHere\u2019s what you can\u2019t avoid, and it\u2019s why we cast Phil. I thought about it, and Matt did too. He was a completely different character because Jamie Tartt was blue collar and a bit of a punk [from] the wrong side of the tracks, and [Archie\u2019s] posh and highly educated and pretentious and a wordsmith,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cThe reason that I work with people over and over again, if I think they\u2019re super talented, A, and B, they\u2019re people I want to spend time with anyways. Phil is both of those, and he has this outrageously great quality for an actor, which is he can do reprehensible things without you ever going, \u2018Oh, I f\u2013king hate that.\u2019 And that is a gift, and I was not going to let it out of my world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tL-R: Lauren Tsai and Phil Dunster in \u2018Rooster\u2019 on HBO Max<\/p>\n

\n\tA confrontation between Greg and Archie in the pilot episode, in which Archie\u2019s prized possession first ideation of Leo Tolstoy\u2019s War And Peace gets brought up, stemmed from a real-life occurrence between Lawrence and Tarses in the writer\u2019s room. Carell\u2019s confusion of Anton Chekhov and Tolstoy leads him to bring up a quote from Checkhov: \u201cNo one must be humiliated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s part of the ethos for the show. \u2018You can\u2019t embarrass [anyone],\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cBut that joke exists on some level because Matt Tarses is so much smarter than I am, and so much more book smart,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cWhen we were doing the War And Peace thing that he had, I thought that was written by Chekhov, you know, because I\u2019m a dummy. So that became the joke that [Greg] would have looked up all sorts of smart things to say based on Chekhov and not on Tolstoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUnfortunately, that book does not survive the pilot episode because Katie sets fire to it in a fit of rage after Archie later tells her that Sunny is pregnant.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCharly Clive in \u2018Rooster\u2019 on HBO Max<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKatie got to this school [and] she didn\u2019t build relationships because she just met a significant other, a partner, right away and became \u2014 which I think happens to lots of young men and young women became his partner \u2014 rather than her own self,\u201d Lawrence said of Charly Clive\u2019s character.<\/p>\n

\n\tLoneliness is a theme to keep lookout for as the show continues, according to Lawrence.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA lot of the characters are intentionally \u2014 Greg\u2019s lonely. Walt, I think he says, \u2018I\u2019m painfully lonely.\u2019 His wife\u2019s gone for half the year. [Dylan] talks about, in the pilot of, \u2018You ever feel surrounded by people, but still really alone?\u201d he said. \u201cIf you if he want me to get personal, [it\u2019s] really hard when your kids leave. Mmy daughter\u2019s off on her own. My boys, ones graduated from college. One just left for NYU. In Shrinking, we pretend my wife [Christa Miller who plays] Liz is the one that\u2019s fearing the empty nest<\/a>. In real life, Christa was like \u2018Peace.\u2019 And I was like \u2018What am I supposed to do now? I\u2019m so lonely. Where\u2019s all the noise? Where\u2019s all the chaos?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNew episodes of Rooster will arrive weekly on HBO Max on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. ET.<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED: Bill Lawrence On \u2018Ted Lasso\u2019 & \u2018Shrinking\u2019 Going Beyond Original 3-Season Runs With New Arcs & \u2018Scrubs\u2019 Revival Bypassing Season 9<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the pilot episode of Rooster on HBO Max. Bill Lawrence\u2019s latest…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":643366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[30],"tags":[226882,171,487,273679,269742,101460,173,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-643365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-bill-lawrence","tag-entertainment","tag-hbo-max","tag-phil-dunster","tag-rooster","tag-steve-carell","tag-tv","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116199724627153028","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}