Danielle Deadwyler explains how working on Rooster felt like 'being in a theatre room'
David Buchanan
“I knew I needed to rejuvenate my nervous system after years of drudgery and tears,” reflects Danielle Deadwyler on why she signed onto the new HBO comedy series Rooster. In the past five years, Deadwyler has become known for emotionally taxing roles, include her Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated performances in Till (2022) and The Piano Lesson (2024).
But surprisingly, her first days working on Rooster and crafting her character Dylan Shepherd, a poet and professor at Ludlow College, took her back to an earlier moment in her career working in the theatre. Deadwyler recently discussed how the show reminded her of the stage during a Rooster press conference before the series premiere on March 8.
Rooster creators Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses approached Deadwyler about the project and recruited her for a “workshop” with star Steve Carell, during which she says the two screen vets were able to “explore the dynamism” of the relationship between Dylan and Carell’s pop fiction author Greg Russo, who Dylan invites as a guest to read from his work during her class. She recalls of the experience, “We were diving. We were working it out. It was really, really fun, and we did that a couple of days… It’s like being in a theatre room at the end of the day. You just want to be in the room, you just want to be doing the work.”
Deadwyler is certainly no stranger to the theatre. Before starring in acclaimed television series including Watchmen (2019) and Station Eleven (2021) and film The Harder They Fall (2021), the actress performed in classic plays in regional theaters, from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf to the Pulitzer Prize winner Clybourne Park and more.
Describing those early days with Carell and the Rooster creative team, Deadwyler remembers, “Everything about this was hyper-collaborative, and that’s the kind of joyful project you want to be on.” The workshop consisted of two of the actress’ most significant scenes from the premiere, titled “Release the Brown Fat.” The first, an intimate conversation with Greg at a bar on campus; the second, an awkward farewell after Greg walks Dylan home. “We just dug into it, and we would just shift with notes and whatnot along the way, trying to figure out who and how she attacks things.”
Indeed, judging from the premiere episode alone, Deadwyler gives the series its gravitas. The scene in the bar features a revealing exchange between the two characters in which Dylan vulnerably admits that she feels “isolated” living and working in the college town after many of her peers have failed to earn tenure. “You ever been completely surrounded by people and still feel utterly alone?,” she asks an equally adrift Greg.
That feeling leads to the delightfully stilted farewell between the two at the end of the night, which starts with Dylan inviting Greg in, hits a low point when Greg sheepishly rejects Dylan twice, and ends with her shattering a windowpane to unlock her door when her key won’t work. Watching Deadwyler’s eyes as she reacts with disbelief and hurt at Greg’s rejection is the highlight of Rooster’s first episode.
But it is equally rewarding to catch glimpses of Deadwyler’s reaction shots in scenes where she’s not in the center of the frame. Take for instance the student Q&A with Greg during Dylan’s class, and the unmistakably quizzical look on her face as Greg is probed by a student about misogyny in his novels. Even better is the disapproval she registers when Walter Mann (John C. McGinley), the university’s president, congratulates Greg on how he handled the student, bemoaning that men of their generation have been branded “bad guys” on liberal arts college campuses. It will be most exciting to see how this dynamic between Dylan, Greg, and Walter and their generational and gender differences crescendo as the freshman season progresses.
Deadwyler’s prowess at conveying the depths of her characters through her eyes — as evinced in these scenes — has certainly been noted by her collaborators in the past. In a New York Times profile of the actress published just days before the release of Till, Patrick Somerville, the creator of limited series Station Eleven, marveled, “Her eyes can do anything… You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”