A full 15 years after Friday Night Lights went off the air, Connie Britton says people still approach her and tell her how much the show means to them. Including, as it turns out, some pretty famous ones.
I spoke to Britton in the lead-up to her appearance on the HBO comedy Rooster, and she says the adoration for FNL is something she experiences frequently, even a decade and a half after the series ended. Even if she can’t get her own family on board quite yet.
“Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard both [came up to] me,” she says. “Their daughter was with them and they were like, ‘Oh my God, we’re watching it and we’re all obsessed as a family.’ But it’s funny. My son has given me so much crap over the years. He’s like, ‘Oh Mom, you never do anything that I can watch.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, now you’re old enough.’”
Friday Night Lights, which ran on NBC and DirecTV from 2006-2011, followed a small-town high school football team and the surrounding community of Dillon, Texas. Britton played Tami Taylor, high school guidance counselor/principal and wife to the team’s head coach (played by Kyle Chandler).
As for Rooster, Britton says that when she was approached by her former Spin City boss Bill Lawrence to appear opposite Steve Carell on the series, the new character fit right into what she looks for in a role.
“For me, it’s important that any character that I play is going to be reflective to the audience [of] who we are,” Britton says. “I’m particularly interested in the female experience and exploring that through these characters. And honestly, it really was playing Tami Taylor that made me realize that we do have that capacity.
“I was incredibly privileged to have the experience [of Friday Night Lights]. It set a bar. [With] every character I play, I want to have women see themselves in some way in it and have men see the women they know in some way.’
In Rooster, Britton plays Elizabeth, the ex-wife of Carell’s character, Greg Russo. In Episode 5, Elizabeth returns to Greg’s life for the grand opening of a building that has been named in her honor. Britton says that, although the shows are tonally different, working on Rooster was similar to her time on Friday Night Lights.
“It’s an environment where there’s room to discover all the time,” Britton says. “We did it on Friday Night Lights, that sort of improvisational background. You discover so much about relationships and character in doing that. And that’s Steve Carell too.
“[He] is the best. We were cracking up all the time, like 100% of the time. It’s a joyous environment, it’s a joyous group of people, but I think the freedom to be able to do that comes from the fact that there’s all of this life going on underneath. And specifically with Steve, it’s all alive and percolating underneath there, and he can access it at any time.”
In Rooster, Britton re-teams with Executive Producer Bill Lawrence, with whom she worked on the sitcom Spin City nearly 30 years ago. Despite their great working relationship, Britton says that working with Lawrence on Rooster was anything but familiar.
“It was absolutely nothing like slipping back into those Spin City days,” Britton says. “Listen, that was my first TV show ever. That was my actual literal first time in front of a TV camera. So I was just a brand new baby actor. And Bill was this kind of wunderkind. He was just a real bro. But he had [Spin City co-creator] Gary David Goldberg and I had Michael J. Fox and that incredible cast.
“So coming in [to Rooster] 30 years later, we’ve both learned a lot. It’s kind of humbling and exciting to see somebody at the very, very beginning and then see how wonderful he’s become. And it’s an environment where you can always discover how to make the show and the story better.”
Britton says that working with Lawrence is a special experience, one that she equates to her time spent on other high-profile shows including The White Lotus and, yes, Friday Night Lights.
“When you have an environment where people can really discover their own greatest version of what they’re trying to do, that’s huge,” Britton says. “We all got to do that on Friday Night Lights. And anybody would go back and look at that and say, ‘I learned I got my chops there.’ White Lotus is the same. Mike White creates an environment where everybody gets to be great, and that’s rare air to breathe.”
Rooster airs on HBO and streams on HBO Max Sundays at 7pm PT / 10pm ET.
For more on Rooster, check out our 10/10 review of the first six episodes and why we called it “a magic trick of a TV show.”
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
