‘Rooster’ Star John C. McGinley Breaks Down Walt’s Dean Pick and Friendship With Dylan in Episode 7 (Exclusive)

Rooster‘s latest episode put Ludlow College’s President at the center of the action as HBO‘s new comedy aimed the spotlight at Walt (John C. McGinley). Warning: Spoilers for Rooster Season 1 Episode 7 ahead!

As Walt was faced with the dilemma of who would fill the role of Dean on campus, he was forced to pick between Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) and the former Dean Riggs (Alan Ruck), who came back to campus after recovering from a heart attack. The problem? Riggs has become more than a liability by today’s academic standards with his inappropriate behavior.

Still, Walt’s long-lasting loyalty to a man who helped guide him on campus leads him to hesitate when it comes to handing the position over to Dylan permanently. Ultimately, it takes some encouragement from others like Greg (Steve Carell) and Katie (Charly Clive), but in the end, Walt makes the correct choice, realizing more women need the opportunity to have an active role in the higher staff positions, and who better to have than one of his closest friends, even if he doesn’t realize it.

How that choice will impact the story moving forward remains for fans to find out, but in the meantime, John C. McGinley is answering our burning questions surrounding the episode, addressing everything from the loneliness epidemic and the nature of Walt and Dylan’s friendship.

HBO

Walt’s been seeking a friend since the start of the season. Why is he so lonely?

John C. McGinley: I think this is a guy, and it’s very close to me, who’s been goal-oriented, he’s had an objective, he’s arrived at his objective, which is to be the president of a college, which is a big deal, climbing the ladder in academia. There have been casualties along the way, and one of them is that they don’t have any kids, so his children are de facto the students, and he has a wife who travels six months a year because she must be looking for something, and it’s left Walt ocupying a space that is…. there’s kind of an epidemic that you may or may not know going on with men in the United States of loneliness, and I think Billy Lawrence in exploring that, that’s a rich landscape for writers to unearth and to investigate, and he’s put that on Walt’s ladder, as he says in the hothouse, this is a deeply lonely guy.

I wrote to Billy after he said we were going to do this. I wrote a manifesto on loneliness and my relationship to it. It was a couple of pages long, single-spaced, and it was just musings about different disconnects in my life, and Billy integrated that into how Walt has arrived in the world as a really superficially successful guy whose cup is not necessarily full.

It takes a bit of time before Walt is convinced to give Dylan the Dean job permanently. What kind of awakening does he have to go through in order to reach that decision? 

I think that the long walk and talk that Walt and Riggs have in [Episode 7], I think we see Walt in real time reconciling liabilities and assets, and Riggs is a liability. And we hear him accounting for it in the hothouse with Greg when he says I met him the first week I was here, and when you’re grasping for somebody or something to hang on to when you’re in a new situation… and he owns that. And then Billy wrote this great line that I have people who all want something from me, I don’t have friends, I have people who need things from me.

That could be a “cry me a river,” or if someone’s telling the truth, that’s somebody reaching out, that’s a lonely guy, and loneliness can be really toxic, or it can completely arrest us. While Walt can’t afford to be in a state of arrested development because he has so many plates spinning in academia, it does give him preoccupations to hide behind, so you don’t have to look at the man in the mirror because sometimes that’s a really lonely vision.

This episode also delves deeper into Walt’s relationship with Dylan, who seems to be his true best friend. Does Walt even realize that?

I think you’re right, and I don’t think that’s a spoiler because I don’t know if Billy’s going to weave that into the tapestry of the landscape of Season 2, but because I love Danielle so much, and I always tell actors when I teach them the camera is an X-ray machine, and so that John C. McGinley absolutely worships and respects and thinks Danielle is one of the best actors on the planet, and the camera sees that. Then that becomes gifted to Walt. Your eye is a good one because I think the camera picks that up as well.

The show has been renewed for Season 2. What excites you about potentially delving deeper into that friendship as Rooster goes on the rest of this season and the next? 

Selfishly, anytime I can be in the frame with Danielle Deadwyler, my life is better. I don’t want to delve too much into spoilers, but what I can tell you, without wrecking it for you, is that everybody’s expendable.

Rooster, Season 1, Sundays, 10/9c, HBO and HBO Max