On the iPhone, there is an autocorrect feature that tends to flip a certain cuss word to “duck.” Many, if not all, of us have faced this dilemma: “I’m so DUCKING angry,” one sends, furiously pressing the delete button to change the capital D back to an F. This little glitch has now inspired an entire episode of television.
Roar, Apple TV+’s new female-centric anthology saga from the creators of GLOW, mashes this autocorrect nonsense into one episode and tosses Emmy-nominated Merritt Wever into the mix. A lonely woman has sex with a duck. (Don’t worry: There’s a meet cute, too.) In an era where new absurdities hit the timeline every hour, you shouldn’t scroll past this. For real: a little mallard flaps his way into a woman’s nether regions while she yelps in delight, writhing around in ecstasy on the kitchen floor. Seriously.
“I don’t want to think about it,” Wever tells me, with a sigh—though minutes ago, she was just speaking fondly of the live duck used on set: “I feel like we hit our stride pretty early on. Justin the duck was wonderful to work with.”
But there’s more to “The Woman Who Was Fed By A Duck” than the sex scene and Justin. The duck, named Larry in the episode, which Wever’s Alisa meets in a park, actually becomes her abusive boyfriend. Their affair begins with the quack chatting her up by blasting the lack of charisma in everyday men, propping himself up on a duck-sized pedestal to promote the level of understanding he has for women.
Apparently, Chloë Sevigny was not alone when, in The Last Days of Disco, she claimed that “there’s something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck.” There’s some allure to those ducks, for whatever reason, and Wever was ready to break it all down.
What was your initial reaction when you read the short story and the script?
When I got sent the script, I got sent a note that said it’s about a woman who’s in an emotionally abusive relationship with a duck. So, I knew that going in. I had that framework in place, so I didn’t have the experience that I’m assuming, or hoping somebody watching the episode has. Which is like, “Oh, she’s talking to a duck. Oh, now she’s dating the duck. Oh, now the duck is, you know.” It was like getting a head’s up.
This is from the original story, but why do you think a duck works well, and not another animal?
I know! It’s a good question. The purest and truest answer is that it’s based on the story from the book, which is “The Woman Who Was Fed By a Duck.” The story in the book is very different. It is just a woman on a park bench lamenting aspects of her life, and the duck comes up and starts to speak to her and give her his thoughts. Our wonderful writer, Halley Feiffer, had a specific response to that and a specific slant, or take, and used it as a jumping off point. The truth is, I think that’s why it’s a duck.
It was always going to be the duck.
But having her act out a relationship that sometimes can be very subtle, hard… the dynamic can develop slowly over time. It can make you wonder if it's happening, if you’re right, if you’re wrong. It can make you question what you know, what you think, what you feel. It can eat away at you, and chip away at you, as it does this character. Her going through it with a duck adds to her severely doubting herself in her own mind.
What was it like to stay rooted in the dynamic of an abusive relationship while there’s the fantastical duck element, too?
It’s playing everything as realistically as you can, and trying to stay as believable as possible in an unbelievable situation. Which, I guess all of these episodes have in common. And then just hoping that if I treat this as though it’s the most normal thing in the world, the people watching will also be invited into this normalcy. But yeah, more so than other things I’ve done, I can’t pretend to imagine what it’s like to see it with fresh eyes.
How did you find chemistry with a duck? The chemistry you guys have in the episode is actually there, in the beginning.
[Laughs] That’s so funny! I’m very glad. I thought working with an animal would be the challenge of the episode. And, unexpectedly, I feel like we hit our stride pretty early on. Justin the duck was wonderful to work with. It sounds like I’m bullshitting, but he was actually wonderful. I thought that the whole episode would be us grabbing a sentence or two of a scene here and there, you know, in between the duck waddling away or quacking.
He cooperated!
It was set up so that Justin Kirk, who voices Larry, was there with us every day, just off camera, playing every scene with me. So I would be watching this live duck—a living, breathing creature that is looking at me, and listening, and moving its head and stuff—and then I would have Justin Kirk acting with me. Having those dual focal points really worked. That ended up being fun and feeling very alive, because there’s also the element of, I don’t know! The duck could start talking at any second. The duck could leave any second.
Do you think that the two were a good pair? Did they resemble each other?
Justin and Justin? Justin the duck is named after Justin Timberlake, by the way. The rest of them were also named after Backstreet Boys. Yes, I do think that they complemented each other quite nicely.
Was it easy to work with the duck?
The duck was there every day. Like I said, I anticipated that being this crazy, unruly, difficult time, and it wasn’t. The first time I spent time with Justin the duck, I hadn’t realized that my hands had a startle response. Whenever he would move his head really quickly, the duck bill, I always felt the need to get my hands out of the danger zone. But that settled down. At the end of the day, the hardest part of the episode was what’s always the hardest part of any job—any acting job—which is the acting.
I have to ask. What was it like to film the sex scene with the duck?
I don’t want to think about it. It was just part of the job, and so we had to get it done. And get it done, we did! But seen it, I have not.
