‘Roar’ Star Merritt Wever Calls Acting Opposite the Duck in the Apple TV+ ‘Wonderful’ (Exclusive)

Merritt Wever didn’t know what to expect when she learned a duck would be the romantic lead in her episode of Roar, but the Emmy-winning actress was up for the challenge. Ahead of the Apple TV+ anthology series’ premiere on April 15, Wever opened up to PopCulture.com about bringing the truth and emotion of a story about womanhood to her episode, “The Woman Who Was Fed By A Duck.”

Taking a story like that of a woman who becomes romantically involved with a talking duck and making it feel grounded was one challenge, but Wever admitted she initially was concerned about how it would be to have a duck as her main scene partner. “Logistically, I thought it was going to be the hardest part of the job,” she told PopCulture. “I thought we would be stealing little snippets – like maybe we’d get a couple lines into the scene and then obviously the duck will waddle away or start quacking, and instead, the duck was wonderful to work with.”

Praising her feathered colleague as “really incredibly well-behaved,” Wever said the duck would look at her, listen to her and respond to her voice as she performed to it. That, paired with actor Justin Kirk voicing the duck off-camera and out of her line of sight, made filming a one-of-a-kind experience. “[I had] two sources of alive-ness to work with as an actor, and it ended up being really fun,” Wever said. “It didn’t end up being the challenge of the show like I thought it would be.”

Fivel Stewart had her own obstacles filming “The Girl Who Loved Horses” for Roar. The Atypical actress told PopCulture ahead of the premiere that she was immediately drawn to the idea of filming a Western saga as a woman of Native American and mixed Asian descent, but that the seven weeks leading up to filming learning how to ride a horse bareback in the brutal Santa Clarita weather was a challenge of its own. 

“Preparing for it was really physically exhausting,” she admitted. “I would use the word ‘exhausting’ because that’s the only word that really explains devastatingly tired. But not negatively exhausting – like it was still really fun.” Roar is streaming now on Apple TV+.