A bold new dark comedy is on the way, and it’s turning heads before it even hits the screen. First-time feature director Mills McQueen has completed principal photography on Rooster, a razor-edged satire packed with a high-profile ensemble. The cast list reads like a who’s-who of prestige TV and indie film, including Grant Gustin (The Flash), Emmy-nominated Tom Pelphrey (Ozark, Task), Emmy nominee Paul Sparks (House of Cards), Julia Schlaepfer (1923), Matt Gomez Hidaka (Eddington), Beau Knapp (The Nice Guys), and Yao (Sinners).
Rooster centers on a debt-burdened Austin salesman who, in a desperate bid to change his luck, borrows his neighbor’s prized rooster. When the bird dies and he clandestinely substitutes a replacement, his flamboyant neighbor—a local tour guide who treats his flock as family—starts digging for the truth. What follows is an escalating feud that spirals into betrayal, obsession, and ever-wilder absurdity.
Filmed in and around Austin, the project is produced by Carl Effenson (Mudbound, Bob Trevino Likes It) and Kelly Peck (The Brutalist, The Son and the Sea). The executive producers are Amber Brask, Mills McQueen, Edgar Rosa, Alex Borlenghi, Michael Denton, and Greg Denton.
Speaking to Deadline, producers Effenson and Peck praised McQueen for a rare mix of levity and menace, calling Rooster “unlike anything we’ve seen” and expressing excitement for audiences to discover McQueen’s original voice on the big screen.
McQueen himself emphasized a commitment to fresh storytelling that nods to simpler, more intimately connected cinema. He described Rooster as an homage to 1990s filmmaking—films made for large-format screens and enjoyed repeatedly at home—and framed the project as part of a broader renaissance that reconnects audiences with the theatre experience.
Represented by major agencies and management teams, Gustin, Pelphrey, Sparks, Schlaepfer, Hidaka, Knapp, and Yao bring a diverse range of television and film experience to the project, underscoring the film’s blend of prestige and offbeat humor.
Would you like Rooster’s marketing copy rewritten to emphasize a particular angle (e.g., competing roosters as a metaphor for ambition, or the buddy-feud dynamics), or keep the current ensemble-driven emphasis while leaning more into the darker humor?
