He asks me if I’m splitting the G. I beg his pardon. “That feels like an inappropriate question, doesn’t it?” Phil Dunster says with a hooligan’s giggle. We’re sitting at a booth inside McGee’s, an Irish pub a stone’s throw from Times Square. (Also, famously, the pub that inspired the main bar on How I Met Your Mother.) The thirty-four-year-old actor, who was born in Northampton in the UK and raised in a British military family, explains to me—a dude from New Jersey—that splitting the G is a game wherein your first drink of a pint of Guinness should leave the top of the brew “splitting” the G on the glass. “It became a viral thing,” he explains. “Most Irish people probably roll their eyes. They’re like, ‘Fuck’s sake, just drink it.’ ”
Before we met for lunch in late February, the man who played AFC Richmond’s star forward on the Apple TV hit Ted Lasso assumed he’d have to dress up for a high-end midtown steakhouse and brace himself for a long and winding chat. Dunster thought he’d need to endure probing questions about his new HBO series Rooster and a potential Ted Lasso return, plus wicked jet lag after flying thirty-five hundred miles from London to New York the night before. Which he absolutely did, but not without a bit of mercy: I picked a place that proudly serves Guinness. Instead of an oxford, he’s relaxed in a Formula 1 jersey his mates got him during his stag party. “Or, um, bachelor weekend, or whatever it is you guys call it,” he says with a grin.
We clink pints (and I fail to split the G) as Obama-era Top Forty hits overwhelm the place, a soundtrack fitting for a bar whose associated TV show ended in 2014, when Dunster was fresh out of drama school in Bristol. A short year later he was onstage doing Shakespeare (in a modern take on Much Ado About Nothing, in which his Claudio held a scoped assault rifle) and booking his first TV credit on the sitcom Catastrophe. Then, in 2020, Dunster charmed the world as arrogant footballer Jamie Tartt on Ted Lasso. Over the course of three seasons, Jamie evolved from pampered athlete to earnest team player, earning Dunster a fandom as rabid as that of any Premier League club.
Given that Lasso last aired in May 2023—in a third season that was tepidly received—you’d think the passion for AFC Richmond would’ve quieted by now. Nope. During lunch, not one but three groups of people muster up the courage to interrupt and ask Dunster if he’s “the guy on Ted Lasso.” One cluster of tourists show him their group chat, named “Church of Lasso.” Dunster happily obliges with selfies and video shout-outs to friends at home. “It struck a chord,” he says of the acclaimed comedy from TV creator Bill Lawrence, who is also one of the creators behind Rooster, alongside Matt Tarses. “It happened at a time people really needed a comfort show.”
People can always use a comfort show, whether it’s during a pandemic or while we’re waging another expensive war on the far side of the world. Lawrence is meeting the demand with Rooster—a new yet spiritually like-minded HBO series. Steve Carell stars as Greg, a novelist who gets a job teaching creative writing at an East Coast liberal-arts college. Dunster trades in football kits for Brooks Brothers sweaters to play Archie, a Russian-literature professor who, as the show begins, has left Greg’s daughter for a grad student.
Put Tartt and Archie in the same room and silence might fill the void. But Dunster knows what they have in common. “Archie is an erudite academic,” he says over bites of a turkey burger painted with ketchup. “The problem is that he knows that more than anyone. Someone who has that much conviction, that much self-aggrandizement—how do you play it so that it isn’t one-dimensional?”
Dunster was a younger man when he starred on Ted Lasso, when he himself learned to have so many eyeballs on him. Now he feels closer to Archie. Jamie was a boy who grew up; Archie is a grown man relearning the fundamentals. “There’s a confidence one gets as they work more, and are alive longer, through life experiences that anybody would learn turning thirty,” he observes. “I was twenty-seven when I started on Ted. I’ve gotten married since then. You just age.”
While Dunster doesn’t have kids (yet), he does have nieces—and he’s happy to finally have something they can watch together. (His posh philanderer in Rooster isn’t exactly a role model.) He’s filming How to Train Your Dragon 2, a live-action remake of the 2014 DreamWorks hit sequel. Its magnitude, with its greenscreens and stunts, is new to Dunster, a far cry from his humble start in a school production of Under Milk Wood at seventeen. “It’s bombastic. It’s playful. It’s huge,” he says.
Looking ahead, Dunster can’t say anything about coming back to Ted Lasso, which returns for a fourth season in August. Actually, one of the selfie seekers beat me to it. “We’ll cross our fingers,” he told them. He tells me the same. “But my wife is directing it,” he says, referring to Ellie Heydon, his partner of nine years. “It was such a huge part of my life and, by proxy, her life. It’s now her experience, and it’s special to see another perspective. It’s gonna be brilliant.”
Anyway, there’s Rooster, a funny, charming sitcom in its own right. When more patrons spot Dunster and bring up Ted Lasso, I hint to him that it’s a good opportunity for some shameless plugging. “Oh yeah—watch Rooster,” he tells them. They promise him they will. I believe them. People always need a comfort show.
By Eric Francisco
