Photo by Stephanie Diani. Styling by Warren Alfie Baker. Grooming by Jessica Ortiz.

[This post contains spoilers from the first season finale of Rooster]

Phil Dunster has a history with “assholes” — his word, not mine — in Bill Lawrence comedies. The English star broke out with his Emmy-nominated turn in Ted Lasso as the cocky and often misguided footballer Jamie Tartt, tracing a tricky arc from hotshot loudmouth to humbled team player over three hugely popular seasons. When Lawrence invited him back for Rooster, which concluded its first season on HBO on Sunday night, he presented a very different kind of character: a brilliant professor with a different accent and a more complex worldview. But one thing remained the same: He was kind of a prick.

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Over the first season, though, Archie digs himself into a deeper and deeper hole — far from Jamie showing glimmers of self-improvement by this point in Lasso’s run, the Rooster finale leaves our sort-of antagonist more miserably self-involved than ever. He turns his back on grad student Sunny (Lauren Tsai), with whom he’s having a child, to reunite with his estranged wife Katie (Charly Clive), whom he’d left after cheating on her with Sunny in the first place. Katie fully catches on to his selfish game, though, and firmly rejects him at last. By the time Archie tries to win Sunny back, with nowhere else to turn, she’s gone too.

For the generally warmhearted comedy of Rooster, it’s an awfully fine line to walk — to keep Archie believably terrible, while also just charming enough to make spending time with him more entertaining than irritating. Fortunately, this is a kind of specialty for Dunster.

Phil Dunster

Stephanie Diani

You had a very fine line to walk all season on Rooster. What did you make of where we leave Archie in the finale?

I just watched it with my mother-in-law. Every single time we finish a scene with Arch, she keeps saying to me, “Well, you’re going to be nice to me during the next scene, aren’t you?” Each time, it feels like there is an olive branch that’s left out for Archie to grab hold of, but he just doesn’t. He fumbles it each time.

He’s now at rock bottom because all of his bravado, all of his charm and charisma are null and void. Both of his seemingly viable options have now told him to fuck off. He’s stuck. He’s totally scraped the barrel and been found out. He’s had such a public breakdown of these two relationships, I wonder where we will find him at the start of season two. It’s been a tricky tone. I tried to bring some of that Jamie Tartt in this show; [creator Bill Lawrence] thought I could do douchebag-y things whilst trying to maintain some semblance of you being on his side a little bit. It was just trying to find that balance.

There’s a moment at the end of Ted Lasso season one where we see some hope for Jamie — a flash of the shift that we know comes. We don’t quite get that here.

It’s about maintaining that sense of trajectory and making us feel like we never go too far with him, too far into a place [where] we can’t then get it back. He’s really toeing that line. The feedback, really, that I am aware of, mostly from my mother-in-law, who’s terrified that I’m going to turn out to be a horrible person, is that you, as an audience member, really want to like him, but he’s just desperate to make it as hard as possible. It is an interesting line, and it is a really fun line. It’s always more exciting to play. When you look at people like Tim Curry and Alan Rickman, there’s a great history of British actors playing baddies. We quite enjoy being the antagonist a little bit for some reason. There’s a playfulness, there’s a twinkle in the eye, there’s a sort of tongue in the cheek to that sort of tradition.

Do you worry about unlikability at all?

I suppose not from moment to moment for a character. I don’t mind that because it gives you somewhere further to go. It also is often more fun because there’s tension between what the righteous path is and what this character’s decision is. Also, I think that, I don’t know, it’s not up to me. All I can do, without sounding too highfalutin, is serve the text, serve the character, serve whatever’s honest to what the director needs from me in that moment. It’s trusting in them that it’s not all one-dimensional, it’s all part of more of a kaleidoscope of what makes this person. I don’t mind it because it just adds texture, hopefully. (Pause) But yes, I worry all the time, sure.

Phil Du

'Rooster': Phil Dunster on Playing Another Asshole After 'Ted Lasso'