‘Rooster’ Star Danielle Deadwyler Has Always Been the Goofball

[This story contains spoilers from Rooster’s sixth episode, “Cop Hawk.”]

Years ago, well before Danielle Deadwyler emerged as a dramatic powerhouse on the big screen with lauded roles in Till and The Piano Lesson, she described herself to me as a “goofball.” The descriptor should track for anyone who’s spent time with the Atlanta native personally, and — at least until recently — may seem hard to believe to outside observers. That’s because Deadwyler has proven her knack for summoning visceral, harrowingly realistic emotion in stories of painful resonance, work which has led to a bevy of critics’ awards, Indie Spirit and BAFTA nominations — and a good deal of outcry over Oscar snubs. And the way this industry works, when you get good at one thing, it can be hard to even get the chance to use the rest of your tools.

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Deadwyler is at last seeing that change for herself with Rooster, HBO’s amiable new half-hour toplined by Steve Carell. Deadwyler gives a wonderfully grounded comic performance as Dylan Shepard, a poet and professor at the New England liberal arts college where popular novelist Greg Russo (Carell) has landed an adjunct gig. The pair’s initially flirty, then sweetly platonic bond helps anchor the show, all while Dylan has been on her own journey of temporarily running her underfunded department while the miserable Dean Vincent Riggs (Alan Ruck) recovers from a heart attack. The series was just renewed for a second season.

With her own background in academia and her deep love of poetry, Deadwyler’s intimacy with the role is immediate and winning. Yet there are more layers at work here: Watching Dylan tentatively find her way in a new space with new colleagues nicely represents what this role marks for Deadwyler in her fast-rising career arc. Indeed, her year so far has been characterized by jumping at unconventional opportunities, from taking on a still-unseen role in Euphoria’s third season to leading Ryan Coogler’s upcoming X-Files reboot. As she tells The Hollywood Reporter below, this is exactly how she wants it. 

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I’m curious how you’ve experienced Rooster airing over these last few weeks. What kind of feedback have you gotten? Are people like, “Wow, Danielle is funny!”

(Laughs.) I’m a wreck. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s people receiving you in a new way. There are traces of that available, but people don’t have a full plate. So this is getting a full meal’s worth and people are into it. They’re calling and giving me live comments on Instagram. I feel like people are getting an emotional blanket they didn’t know that they needed. At least that’s what they’re saying: “I didn’t know I needed this and I’m getting it and I love it.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.” I don’t listen or read reviews and things of that nature.

Are you surprised you’re landing with people in a different way? Or was that to be expected, making a show like this?

I’ve seen some really crazy things. People were saying, “Oh, you don’t have to be so serious and hard and downtrodden.” I find this so funny because it’s as if the capacity to do the thing means I’m not laughing and joyful in the sharing of a thing all the time. I don’t know. I find it weird that people don’t think that because of the “rightness” of watching a thing. So over a period of time, the presumption that the person is the characters that they played — I find that funny. So here you go, people: I have teeth. I have a boisterous laugh and a beating heart.

So how do you notice people carrying that impression of you? Where are you hearing it?

I’m not the biggest Instagram person, but if I’m on I see some stuff. I do have a child and he is like, “Yo mom, they said this.” I do have friends who are like, “Look at this. Look at this shit!” They’re observant of my life and how it is reverberating in the world. And that’s fine. It’s whatever. I’m living my life and minding my business. 

But we can agree Rooster is very different from some of those recent, heavier projects. How does it feel different, or lighter, in the making of it?

Sometimes I would call my team after the first couple of weeks they’ll be like, “Hey guys, I’m not losing my mind. I got a good night’s sleep. Is that normal? Do actors get that?” Or I said, “I didn’t work every day this week. Is that okay?” Sometimes I only worked twice a week! People live this life! It was fascinating to do that and it gave me room to do other things. It gave me room hang with my son. It gave me room to read more. It gave me room to sleep. It was the coziest of blankets. I laid in the bed more often than I thought. Yeah, it did that for me. It’s comforting.

People have been particularly excited about your chemistry with Steve Carell. You guys have a fun, easy rapport. How did you find and deepen that over the season? 

Steve and I are curious. Curiosity is such a critical thing when you feel you already know something, you’re failing and there’s no easy footing. Dylan feels like she has footing, but upon his arrival and shifting the whole dynamic, she and her professional dynamic is upset and then her personal is also upset. So just: Stay on your toes. That’s what the characters are forced to do because they have to learn each other. We are encouraged to do that too — Steve and I didn’t know each other beforehand, so like Dylan and Greg, we are learning each other, that awareness and that pull and magnetism into: Who are you? What do you do and why do you do it? That is what makes chemistry work, staying completely invested even though you don’t know.

Steve is not new to the world of TV comedy, nor are your show’s writers. Did anything surprise you about how they approach the form? 

I was surprised by how quickly they enabled us to put our sauce in. Day one, I was like, “Wait a minute, are my ingredients ready? Let me chop my herbs first.” They enabled me and others to be that comfortable to where you can add your little shenanigans in. As a theater baby at root, I know what rhythm is and how it’s like a train when it comes to these kinds of things. You can see it in the quick-wittedness of the people, of each character. You can see it in the way they talk. All of it is there and you have to just ride that rhythm. I was elated to have that feeling.

Did you have the full season arc for Dylan when you got started?

No, we were coming up with stuff. (Laughs.) That’s how fast this thing is. A lot of it didn’t necessarily know where it was going. Sometimes they’re building — they built out several episodes, but some stuff hadn’t been definitive yet. But they had a mapping. Through multiple takes you’re able to play and find and nitpick the possibility of outcomes as you keep going. And they enable you to build, like, “Let’s play with the three different directions.” 

So how would you describe her journey in this first season?

There’s a personal and a professional journey. The personal is accepting, which was a complete note of surprise. She did not know how flawed she was and how fucked up she was and how that’s coming out in this person who’s seemingly the antithesis of her. He’s a commercially viable, celebrated author and is being rewarded — despite not being a person of this ilk, of this institutional rearing. Then she’s being pushed to be a leader and no longer just an educator, but coming into leadership professionally. Those are two difficult things: to reject perfectionism and to allow for your leadership voice to come full throttle. 

At the end of episode six, Dean Riggs returns just as Dylan is settling into her interim position. She’s hanging her stuff on the walls and getting comfortable. She herself seems surprised by the way she’s leaning in just as it’s getting taken away. 

Yeah, it’s the fucking rug being pulled off from under you — and he’s so smug and nasty about it. That’s when you really start to fight for it. When you realize that you’ve had the capacity the whole time right when something is taken, you go, “I had so much to give, I had so much to offer, and is it not going to be witnessed now?” That’s what that feeling is. That’s the dirtiness of rugs and pulling.

As someone who knows the academic world well, was there anything important to bring forward in Dylan once you did start to feel settled — and able to put your sauce on it, as you put it?

We’re still going to be digging into this in the second season. Dylan has a lot more weirdness and freakiness to play with and push into. She’s vocalizing her challenges, lack of friends, which is a richer attraction to Greg — how she’s got a ripeness about her rhythm at the school, particularly with regard to dating and relationships. What it means for her to truly exist outside of this framework is something that will eventually come out more, or what I want it to play with more. 

Euphoria also premiered last night. You’re in this new season, though you haven’t appeared yet. Is there anything to you about these two characters being on the same network at the same time? 

I did a lot of episodic stuff early on — a TV movie was one of my first longform leading opportunities. I almost forgot how it felt to move with a certain level of pace. But so much of TV has the ability to feel cinematic and I enjoy returning to that. I know that the women in the dramatic pieces that have been witnessed thus far in my films are women who push for a certain kind of presentation for public eyes. This is just much more intimate in a certain way. On the film side, my characters have been family oriented in a certain way and needed to be some level of perfect — and I think that these women are not. And that’s all you can get. (Laughs.)

You’re also starring in the new X-Files series that Ryan Coogler is developing. How has it been getting to know him?

Ryan is great. I have nothing to give you. (Laughs.)

I know, I know. I am curious just about you getting to know him, though. 

I’ve had a bit of time to talk with Ryan and to dig on things. He is the epitome of what I love to work with: People who are deeply collaborative. That’s the most important thing. We are interwoven as human beings in this globe, in this art form, in these practices. It’s like 50 million people on a set. You are with everybody. You’re not just with yourself or whoever your scene partner is. Ryan builds with that in mind and I couldn’t be happier to be in that orbit.

I would imagine for you that it’s also, again, getting to step into a new kind of format as an actor, right?

And to be honest, it’s just going with the flow with a lot of it. Everything is deeply intuitive to some degree. That’s the beauty of poetry: You get to connect the web. The web is unceasing. It’s not like it stopped. You’re continuing the thread; this thread might be thicker, more viscous with something else than viscous to something that was 10 years ago. To be quite frank, you are always looping. That’s what a poet is — it’s looping things, it’s abstraction. Sometimes you’re dropped into a grounding of a thing and then you pop back up. I’ve been reared in that academically and artistically and I do feel deeply blessed to be able to play in that way.

Give me all the new forms, give me all the other forms, all alt forms. We need alternative spaces perpetually to explore the multiplicity of our identities — and that is what I am doing with all these brilliant people.

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Rooster airs Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max.

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