Yep, Phil Dunster Is Having a LOT Fun Playing a "D**B**g" on HBO’s ‘Rooster’

Phil Dunster is having a very good time playing a very questionable man.

The Ted Lasso alum stopped by The Rich Eisen Show to talk about Rooster, the new Bill Lawrence series airing Sundays at 10 p.m. Eastern on HBO. Dunster plays Archie, a Russian studies professor on the campus of fictional Lalo College. When Rich asked how Archie would describe himself, Dunster did not hesitate.

"Extraordinarily talented," Dunster said. "Very handsome."

The reality is messier. Archie's personal life is collapsing on him while he tries to navigate it without making any moves Dunster would describe as healthy. He is married to the daughter of Steve Carell's character, he has cheated on her, he has gotten a postgraduate student pregnant, and now he is trying to figure out whether he can be a husband, a father, or both, and whether he could be any good at either.

Dunster talked through the appeal of playing characters like that. The fun, he said, is finding the reasons such people convince themselves they are actually good.

"From an external perspective, you look at that and go, he must just know that he's a bit of a do, surely," Dunster said. "But then he's there going, well, I, she loves me and she loves me, and I really enjoy boinking both of them, so what's, why not, because it makes total sense."

Rich pointed out that Bill Lawrence has a trademark for this kind of show. The fabric, Dunster agreed, is people doing relatable but reprehensible things in mad scenarios, wrapped in the same warmth Lawrence built into Ted Lasso and Shrinking.

The production process surprised even Dunster. The series films at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, which lets the show borrow a real campus that, on screen, reads like a liberal arts college in Connecticut. The catch is that California does not get the seasons. So someone on the show's staff is paid to clip colored leaves onto live trees, and post-production paints them out as needed.

"It's all a beautiful machine that's wearing away," Dunster said.

Table reads, even on a Lawrence production, are still terrifying. The first time you say the lines out loud, the writers are watching, and actors, Dunster admitted, are attention seekers. You want the laughs. You want to know you are getting it right.

The conversation turned back to Ted Lasso, where Dunster's Jamie Tartt arc is a Rich favorite. Rich highlighted the Amsterdam bicycle scene with Brett Goldstein's Roy Kent, and the way Ted stayed there for Jamie even after Jamie jilted the team.

Dunster reframed what made Jamie work. Footballers, he said, are almost beyond satire because their lives are so extraordinary. He sees them as modern-day gladiators who live and die by their performances in front of 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 people, screaming or booing in real time. The drama, he argued, is the collision of that vocational visceral life with the messier domestic one.

He pulled the Sopranos comparison without flinching. Tony Soprano is a mob boss, and he is also in therapy. Take that tension between two worlds and put a soccer player at the center, and the result is a character worth playing. Take a Russian studies professor at a small liberal arts college, give him a wife, a mistress, and a moral compass that does not work, and the result, in Rooster, is Archie.