Rooster Breakout Charly Clive on Going Toe to Toe With Steve Carell

Images of Rooster actress Charly Clive shot by Emily Soto. The black and white photos show Charly sitting on the ground wearing a black pinstripe blazer dress with black heels with metal detailing.

English actress and comedian Charly Clive nearly took a break from acting, when she landed the gig of a lifetime: a starring role opposite her comedy hero Steve Carell in the new HBO series Rooster. “It was good timing,” she laughs. Understatement of the year. In its first few days of streaming, Rooster became HBO’s most-watched comedy series debut in over a decade.

Creators Bill Lawrence (Ted Lasso and Shrinking) and Matt Tarses’s Rooster centers on the complicated relationship between a best-selling novelist and his art history professor daughter. When Greg Russo (Carell) arrives on the Ludlow College campus to visit his daughter Katie (Clive), he finds her life has been upended after her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), leaves her for a younger woman. With Greg still recovering from his own marriage fallout, an opportunity presents itself to stay in town and help each other regain their footing. This charming Sunday-night comedy is high on laughs, coupled with a lot of heart and truly stellar performances, especially from breakout Clive.

Clive grew up in the UK before moving to New York City to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. When she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 23, she, along with her comedy writing partner, Ellen Robertson, turned her experience into a sold-out comedy stage show called Britney. That said, Rooster marks Clive’s biggest U.S. screen project to date. With Carell’s stamp of approval, she beat out a half-dozen actresses for the coveted role of Katie. And not a moment too soon either.

We caught up with Clive, a self-proclaimed vintage enthusiast, to talk about meeting her acting heroes, going toe to toe with Carell, and choosing to go exclusively secondhand for her press tour looks.

Images of Rooster actress Charly Clive shot by Emily Soto. The black and white photos show Charly sitting on the ground wearing a black pinstripe blazer dress with black heels with metal detailing.

Tell me the story about how you got this part.

To me, it feels like a crazy one. I hadn’t worked for a couple of years. It had been a bit of a dry spell. We had the pandemic and the slowness of the industry after that. I said to my agent in January of 2024, “I love acting. It’s the thing I want to do most in my life. But I’m also a writer. I also do comedy. I have other things I can do. I’m not sure how many more nos I can take. I might need a bit of a break from auditioning.” And she was like, “Why don’t we give it a year?” And in December 2024, I booked Rooster. It was good timing.

Basically, I got a tape request sent to my inbox, and at the time, it was called “Untitled Steve Carell Project.” I was like, Well, Steve is my hero, so anything he does, I would like to be part of. I don’t anticipate anyone will ever watch the tape, but I’ll give it a go. A month after sending in my tape, I got a call from Bill Lawrence, and he said, “We’d love to see you on a Zoom with Steve. Would you like to do that?” And I said, “Yeah,” and he goes, “Great, can you be ready in a couple of hours?” After that, I think we did like four more Zooms until finally we did our last chemistry read, which was actually at my friend’s rehearsal dinner. I was supposed to be giving a speech, but I said, “I’m really sorry. I’ve got this quite important job interview.” She made everybody at her rehearsal dinner speak in a low whisper so nobody would interrupt my call.