How Danielle Deadwyler Found the Rhythm and Intellectualism in the College Comedy Chaos of ‘Rooster’

“I love a bitch with some chaos!”

That was Danielle Deadwyler’s enthusiastic response to my question about what drew her to Dylan, the poetry professor she plays in the HBO comedy Rooster. Great as that response was, there was more to the hook.

“I was definitely looking for a different color of being,” Deadwyler added. “I was looking for something lighter and contemporary. I’ve been on campuses galore, way too many degrees to be an actor, and I said, ‘Let’s dig in here.’ The minute I read that she was a poetry professor, I was like, ‘Let’s play.” And the minute they said Steve Carell? ‘Let’s play.’ I just needed to feel those two things.”

The short and long responses are understandable. Deadwyler came to widespread attention by way of her earth-shaking performance in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, playing Mamie Till, the mother of the slain teenager Emmett Till in 1955. Her Golden Globe, BAFTA, and SAG-nominated work was grounded in the agony of parental loss and the conviction of demanding justice from a viciously indifferent system.

“Mamie Till had to walk with a kind of perfection in a need to fucking survive,” Deadwyler recalls about her character. “There’s no margin for error in this body in a lot of ways, though they are flawed. They move with a stiffer spine and an erectness that is beyond difficult and debilitating internally.”

Dylan is a significantly looser role for Deadwyler, whose other notable roles include 40 Yards, The Woman in the Yard, and The Piano Lesson. In Rooster, the series by Scrubs and Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence, Dylan is the stable hand amongst a wacky faculty. Steve Carell and Charly Clive play Greg and Katie, a father and daughter duo who are trying to make sense of Charly’s estranged marriage to Archie (Phil Dunster), a fellow professor. John C. McGinley plays Walter, the college president who spends half his time in a wooden sweatbox and the rest of it cajoling Greg into joining the faculty to save Katie’s job after she accidentally burns down Archie’s on-campus residence. Making a very welcome guest appearance is Connie Britton as Elizabeth, Greg’s ex-wife who Greg is still struggling to leave behind.

Deadwyler plays Dylan with a subtle but perpetual twinkle in her eye, signaling that Dylan knows she’s the most sane person in any given faculty meeting. Her pragmatism and self-awareness don’t preclude her from the higher education shenanigans surrounding her, nor do they shield her from the bumbling, oblivious, and ultimately beguiling charms of Carrell’s Greg Russo. Some of the series’s best tension, both comedic and dramatic, comes from Dylan getting caught slipping, professionally as the interim Dean of Faculty and personally in her “will they, won’t they” entanglement with Greg.

“[Dylan] was just trying to be the good person in public and being honest,” Deadwyler explains about Dylan’s tentative approach to her new position of power at the college. “That’s more real than just somebody standing up in it. There is a reluctance to how it comes to you sometimes, especially thinking about Black folks who end up becoming leaders or being first in something. [She goes], ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ and to front as if [she] does is silly. It’s giving her time to track into what she’s capable of.”

Deadwyler continues, “Leadership should love who they’re leading, and also you shouldn’t want somebody who wants to be the leader. They should be clawing, kicking, and screaming their reluctance. That’s the main person who should be one because they are interested in being as balanced as possible. I think that’s what’s pushing Dylan. She doesn’t want to do it because she knows that being a leader can be fucked up, and she took it from a white man who wasn’t doing the things. So, how does one do the thing properly?”

Dylan’s commitment to honesty in a community of academic ego helped Deadwyler fully transition into comedy after years in drama and action projects. (She made a guest appearance last summer on The Bear as Syd’s cousin Chantel.) It was an adjustment not just to the genre of comedy but also to showrunner Bill Lawrence’s specific approach to it, honed across multiple projects. It was something Deadwyler observed during her audition with Carrell.

“Steve said this wonderful thing, that characters don’t know whether they’re playing comedy or drama,” Deadwyler says. “They don’t know anything. Playing the seriousness of something makes it that much more hilarious, depending on what it is. Sometimes, when you’re doing a dramatic monologue, there are glimmers of levity. Seeing him be serious, devoted, and rigorous in an audition, I said I needed to be in this space, if they’ll have me.”

With respect to how Lawrence tackles comedy, Deadwyler explains, “It’s being on the cues. It’s a quick, fast-paced dynamic. That’s Bill’s world. He’s a fast talker in real life. And yet [his characters] can earn a moment of reflection and warmth, and to earn the counter to what comes out inherently comedic that receives laughter from an audience member.”

Deadwyler’s success in adapting to the show’s rhythms comes from her theater background. “That’s the root,” she says. “I’ve done plenty of comedies on stage, and just knowing how to play with timing, riding the wave, and leaning on your people. It’s being agile and limber. Bill, Matt, and the other producers and writers are throwing in stuff and bending your back a little bit. You cannot be stiff in the least bit.”

It also helped that Deadwyler has extensive experience in college spaces. She attended Spelman College, Columbia University, and Ashland University. It was her time at Ashland that she leaned on the most. “I got more of that Northeast New England experience,” she says. “It’s a quiet dynamic. Ashland is in Ohio, and there’s not much to do, so your whole world is the institution. That’s why it’s so heartbreaking to lose a journal. That’s why you’re invested in your students, why your homie is the freaking president [of the school]. That loneliness is what piques the experimental well for me.”

“Thinking about these spaces, who’s standing next to you, who’s coming in after you, who you’re helping to usher in, I just remember the desolation. It can look and feel empty, so you want to have relationships. And everything that happens in that space is the track and grounds for what’s happening with everyone. So you lean into the micro chaos of these people.”

Amid the organized chaos and undercurrent of ennui, Deadwyler believes that Rooster emphasizes the power of a college community and the fertile ground it offers for engaging complex perspectives, which this particular moment is putting at risk.

“I think the value of [Rooster], considering the challenges of this current climate, the challenges politically, the challenges to freedom of speech, the challenges to protests, and the challenges to diversity of mind, diversity of thought and intellect, the value of intellectualism…bring it back.

Rooster airs weekly on HBO through May 10.