SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils Episode 2 of Rooster on HBO Max.
Wrestling Steve Carell for the second episode of Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses’ comedy series Rooster was not on Phil Dunster’s bingo card.
A culmination of tension brewing between Greg Russo (Carell) and Archie Bates (Dunster) — unfaithful husband of Greg’s daughter Katie (Charly Clive) — arrived once Greg heard that Archie’s grad student mistress Sunny (Lauren Tsai) is pregnant after he slept with her and cheated on Katie.
It’s the baby-related piece of news that prompts Greg to angrily storm into Archie’s hotel room with the all-access ladle key to confront Archie. Archie is staying in the same hotel as Greg after Katie accidentally burned his house down starting with setting fire to his first edition copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
“It was choreographed, and it quickly deteriorated into mayhem. Wrestling Phil Dunster in his underwear will be one of the highlights of my career, I think. I did, as an actor, try to position him in a way as we were wrestling, to make it as awkward as possible for the viewer at home,” Carell said. “No one ever watched playback on this show. It wasn’t really part of the experience. I don’t ever like doing that, because, for me, it gets you in your head, and you start thinking about, ‘Oh, I looked like this when I was doing that.’ So that’s never good for me. But that one we had to watch.”
It just so happens that Archie is doing a live TV spot interview to talk about Russia, his area of academic expertise. Of course, as with many zoom interviews, Archie was business up top and almost nothing on the bottom.
“When we did that first take, I think we watched it two or three times because it made everybody laugh so hard, just watching that unedited first take that just went on for like five minutes of us wrestling and breaking the bed. It was really quite an experience,” Carell added.
Dunster appreciated the willingness with which Carell approached the sequence, which he compared to a “fever dream.”
“[It was] very strange, not on a bingo card, as it were. It was so amazing that he turned up to it with such a sense of play. He was more willing, to get — ‘Let’s find some more little bits.’ He just naturally knows what will work, and what’s funny,” Dunster said. “When we were doing the choreography of it, ‘we go here, then we go there, and then I’m gonna try and get away,’ and we got rather excited during the filming of it, that when the bed breaks, it was because we had jumped on it with such vigor that that wasn’t really supposed to happen. There’s a moment where you’re like, ‘Oh sh-t, that wasn’t supposed to happen, just carry on.’ It’s very funny. And so what was it like? This was like [laughs].”
Co-creator Bill Lawrence had fun watching the scene come together as well, echoing Dunster’s story about the bed breaking.
“We were there, and you never know how it’s gonna happen, because the actors are just getting to know each other. But those two guys with full commitment, it just f-cking killed me,” Lawrence told Deadline in a separate interview. “It was so funny watching those idiots bounce around. I don’t even think the bed was supposed to break. It just kind of broke. I’m a sucker for physical comedy. It makes Matt and me laugh. So we’re going to keep putting it in the show and watching those two do it was watching two people that are very very good at that do it.”
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