Actor Phil Dunster Talks HBO’s ‘Rooster,’ ‘Ted Lasso’ & More with Rich

The leaves on Phil Dunster's new HBO show are not real. They are clipped. Painted out in post when the camera catches them.

Dunster, who plays a Russian studies professor named Archie on Bill Lawrence's new comedy 'Rooster,' told Rich on Friday's show that the production films at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, a campus that 'looks a bit like it could be an East Coast college.' California, of course, does not do seasons. So somebody on the staff clips orange leaves onto live trees, and the rest get scrubbed out frame by frame. 'It's all a beautiful machine that's wearing away,' Dunster said.

The show, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m. Eastern on HBO, comes from the same Bill Lawrence kitchen that produced 'Ted Lasso' and 'Shrinking.' Dunster described Lawrence's signature as 'fairly reprehensible characters doing fairly reprehensible things in quite mad scenarios,' people you forgive because 'you go that's me, that's me, I definitely do that.' His Archie is in the middle of a furore. He has cheated on his wife, knocked up a postgraduate student, and now ricochets between the two women trying to decide whether to be a husband or a father or anything at all.

Rich, working through the Ted Lasso back catalog with Dunster, landed on the Amsterdam bicycle scene with Brett Goldstein as the high point of Jamie Tartt's arc. Dunster agreed. He also recalled filming at the Etihad with Pep Guardiola, who arrived to a 'messianic moment' from the Manchester City extras and who, in the middle of a scene, slapped Dunster hard on the chest the way he slaps his own players. 'It was the greatest thing,' Dunster said.

The footballer, in his framing, is the modern gladiator. 'They turn up to work and they've got 40, 50, 60,000 people screaming their name, booing them if they get it wrong. It is so visceral.' He compared the tension between vocational chaos and domestic life to Tony Soprano in therapy.

Dunster's wife is directing episodes of the new season of Ted Lasso, which is moving forward without him. He is, he said, 'riding shotgun on her experience of it.' Rich, whose own wife Suzy Shuster co-hosts a Women's Sports Now program from the same chair, told Dunster he cherished sharing work with a spouse. Dunster asked Rich to compare Steve Carell and Jason Sudeikis. He stole the answer Rich gave him, then offered his own: both men, on set, are the first to laugh at someone else's joke. They pass instead of scoring.