[The story contains mild spoilers from the season finale of Sunny.]
In less than five years of its existence, Apple TV+ has carved a niche out for itself as a home to evocative, well-made and interesting science fiction, and the streamer has delivered once more with Sunny, the dark Japan-set retrofuturist comedy that wrapped its first season this week.
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Starring Rashida Jones, Sunny tells the story of Suzie Sakamoto, a taciturn American woman living in Kyoto, whose life is upended by tragedy after her husband Masahiko(Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen (Fares Belkheir) disappear in a mysterious plane crash. Poleaxed by grief, Masahiko’s company sends Suzie a domestic robot named Sunny, with artificial intelligence attuned to her particular needs and feelings. As Suzie, reluctantly, begins to bond with Sunny, and eccentric new friend Mixxy (annie the clumsy), the great enigma surrounding the plane crash begins to unravel involving the yakuza and domestic Japanese politics.
As well as tackling weighty themes of grief, loneliness and female friendship, Sunny is also an intriguing future-forward look at robotics and artificial intelligence. Produced by A24 and based on Colin O’Sullivan’s book The Dark Manual, Sunny deliberately deviates from the source material, with creator Katie Robbins (The Last Tycoon, The Affair) and director Lucy Tcherniak (The End of the F***ing World, Angelyne, Station Eleven) most notably making Sunny a female robot instead of male.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Jones on the telephone to discuss the entirety of Sunny, including the big themes captured within the show, the unique look and feel of the drama, and her own misgivings about the role of tech and AI in our lives.
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I finished watching Sunny this morning after bingeing it back to back, and I’ve got to say it was a very intense experience. A real rollercoaster of emotion. With weekly episodes, Apple had a more staggered release of the show. Do you think that’s a better way of consuming Sunny?
I know it’s old school and not everybody does it, but I do think that [staggered release] format lends itself to the show nicely. I’m sure there’s some people who are waiting to start the show when all of [the episodes] are out, because they’re used to that pace. But I do feel like there’s a lot of little things that are dropped along the way that you want to maybe sit with for a little bit before you plunge into the end.
There are lots of big themes within the show, the more obvious ones being grief and loneliness. But there were other themes that I thought came across really well, like friendship.
Well, I think that was always [the creator] Katie Robbin’s intention. To make it about friendship — unintentional friendship — in a way. Suzie is a bit misanthropic, and she’s not out there seeking friends necessarily. She’s sort of forced to put her trust in other people and also other, not people, and to actually feel and care in a way that I don’t think she really wants to. I just think she’s desperate and she’s depressed and she’s lonely, and sometimes those things can be a gift if you let it guide you towards, I guess, making friends — whether they be good or bad.
As you said, Suzie is misanthropic, but that’s kind of against type for you, right? You’re more known for playing more happy characters. Was it challenging to play someone like that?
No, because nobody’s all of one thing. I wouldn’t say I’m not like a relentlessly optimistic person. I’m also pragmatic, and I also have had bouts of depression. I also like being alone. I have an internal life, and sometimes I don’t really want to talk to people. I understand those parts of Suzie. So, it’s an opportunity to kind of be more of myself. I mean, I’m not quite to the level that she is, but there are kernels in that character that I can relate to.
Going back to female friendship, the creator, director and main stars, and obviously Sunny, were all female on this project.
There’s obviously so much conversation around what lens something is seen through, and everybody comes at things as gender specific or not through their own lens. But I think the intention, even before I was on board, for Katie and Lucy was to really center the female friendships.
Also, the women in the show, you have a pretty wide spectrum. You can’t say the women and Sunny are blank. There’s no stereotype, really. These are larger-than-life pulpy characters, but they’re complex and they’re all pretty flawed, and you’re not quite sure how to feel about any of them, including [Suzie]. We all kind of fit in this intersection between doing our best, struggling with our own vulnerability and loneliness, and also finding connection in each other when you need it. That is what I loved about this project: it’s not a clear answer. There’s no visible moral guard rails here. You just kind of have to watch the show and see who is the person who interests you the most and you want to follow their story.
The central relationship is Suzie and Sunny. On screen, we’re seeing you act towards robots, is that how it worked out during the production? That is, there was actually a robot on set with you?
Yeah, it was fairly practical. [Joanna Sotomura, the actress who voices Sunny] was set adjacent. She could be in a tent nearby because she was wearing a really heavy helmet, and the helmet had a big bright light and she would see her dialogue and make her expressions, and then the camera would pick up the expressions and then to kind of robotify them — digitize them and put them on Sunny’s face. So that was always her. Sunny was a distillation of her expressions, and then she would say her lines and it would be piped into that. I was always acting with Joanna.
That made it a lot easier, I presume, rather than just working with a tennis ball or something?
Yeah, I’m not that good of an actor! (Laughs) I find that so hard. To me, the reason to act is to act with people, and to pick up on all the subtleties of acting with the person. I didn’t have all of [the subtleties] with the robot, but Joanna is a really wonderful actor and thank God for her, I couldn’t do it otherwise.
Regarding the overarching elements of the story, there’s robots and there’s AI. Sunny is coming at a time when there’s a big debate about AI in art, but also AIs role in society. Do you think it was fortuitous timing for the show to come out now while these debates are going on, or was it a hindrance?
This show has been in development for quite a while. Before I even got on board, there’s definitely been chatter about AI and the fears that people have, a lot of unknowns. But it does feel like the whole thing has really intensified before the release of the show.
Given the debates over AI, do you think people will look at the show unfairly given its subject matter?
Well, it’s ironic, isn’t it? Because this show is a treatise on AI and what it would be like to live with AI, and whether you can trust them, and will they become sentient over time and all that kind of stuff. But in a practical sense, it was not like there’s anything even close to this [that exists right now] that made our job easier. So in order for this robot to seem that way, we had a fantastic actor. We had a woman doing all of Sunny’s expressions. We had somebody with a remote control moving back and forth. We had a person updating her software and her screen and all that. We had an entire robotics team to make her operate.
In the past, you’ve co-written a Black Mirror episode (about the nightmares of social media), which to be diplomatic, is a series that is skeptical about technology. How do you feel, generally, about these unknown technologies like AI that may be good for us but also could potentially be terrible for us?
Sunny is a bit more nuanced, there are hopeful elements and there are bad elements.
But generally speaking, are you a bit more fearful about tech and the way that tech’s going?
I was thinking about this the other day, about how many people are on the planet. And I was trying to picture a world without tech with this many people. And that was the first time I thought, “Oh, you know what?’ We actually wouldn’t be able to sustain this many people on earth without it.” Think about all the things that are put in place to keep order. Even when tech does exist, there’s insane traffic at airports, for example, so imagine it without tech? This is the first time I really thought, “Ok, maybe I’ll stop being such a naysayer.” Because, I am.
I wouldn’t say I’m a Luddite. I mean, there’s things about technology that I do appreciate. But, I think we humans by nature, are so curious at best, and greedy at worst. And so when we see something that makes our life easier, or more delicious or more interesting and more sensual, we will chase those things because we’re flawed in that way. We want to be entertained, we want to be stimulated, we want to connect and engage all this stuff. And it’s like, to what end? To the end that, maybe, where we could potentially [imperil] our mere existence.
Back to Sunny. The other thing that really jumps out immediately is the look and the feel of the show. The set design, furniture, clothes etc. As an executive producer, were you involved with the way it looked?
Honestly, I signed up when so much of this was already so well-conceived. Katie and Lucy, the director, had a very clear idea of what the show looked like and they gave me a deck, and the deck looks so much like the show looks. I trust their taste, and their taste is really on the money. And the music, I didn’t know how much I would love the music in the show! Our composer, Daniel Hart, his music is so spot on, so beautiful, so original. It fits in with the ’50s, ’60s Japanese stuff, but it also feels very modern and cinematic. I was just an appreciator of all of the elements of the show — the production design, the costume design, they got really incredible artists to realize this world.
The costumes, what you were wearing, top marks.
The costumes are my favorite. Analucia McGorty, who did the costume design, just really had an instinct for what it should look like and how it could embody that retrofuture thing. That’s kind of fundamental about Japan and the Japanese aesthetic, [as well as] feel like its own thing. She really nailed it.
So, lets talk about the finale. It’s left open that there’s more to see. I don’t know where you are with what’s happening in terms of a renewal, but there is more Sunny right?
That is very much the hope and it’s kind of set up that way, which I don’t think we’re spoiling anything for anybody by saying there’s things you’re going to want to know at the end. Did you feel like you were left hanging, did you feel like you were satisfied as well?
I will say, and again this probably is because I binged it really quickly, but [Mixxy’s character played by annie the clumsy], I felt was off from the beginning. Sunny was right from the beginning, is basically what I’m saying. The robot was right. Listen to the robot!
Sunny and Mixxy are both off, by the way!
So the last question before you go. Sunny is an Apple show. Do you enjoy working on the streaming side? Because they seem to have these amazing shows and not many people know about them.
They have really good taste. I wish there was a little bit more awareness about our show. Not gonna lie. I think [Sunny] is finding its audience because people seem to like it and a lot of people talk to me about it. What [Apple] do have is they have really good taste, and they do make really good shows. And they’re also doing this funny, interesting thing which is, they are sort of litigating their own feelings about themselves as a tech company through their shows. That is interesting to me. It’s cool.
Sunny is now streaming on Apple TV+.
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