Rashida Jones refuses to be pigeonholed. Over her three-decade acting career, she has become known primarily for her work in comedy, making a name for herself on sitcoms (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Angie Tribeca).
But over the years, Jones has branched out. She’s showed her chops as a dramatic actor (Boston Public, The Social Network), ventured into producing to tell stories about the inner lives of people of colour (Claws, The Other Black Girl), and even penned her own projects (Celeste and Jesse Forever, an episode of Black Mirror). Her latest outing, however, is unlike anything she has ever done before.
Based on Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 novel The Dark Manual and created by Katie Robbins for Apple TV+, Sunny tells the story of Suzie Sakamato (Jones), an American woman living in Kyoto, Japan, whose world is turned upside down when her husband (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son vanish in a mysterious plane crash. In the wake of their disappearance, Suzie is given Sunny, one of a new class of domestic robots made by her husband’s electronics company and specifically designed for her. Although she initially resents the looming presence of Sunny in her life, Suzie gradually begins to lean on the most immediate reminder of her husband for support, and together they uncover the dark truth about what really happened to her family.
A stylish, darkly comedic thriller, Sunny is the latest series to explore the ethical concerns surrounding artificial intelligence, one of the key concerns of last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood. “I know everybody’s very scared of AI, and I’m one of those people, but I think the human condition of loneliness is as old as humanity,” Jones tells Harper’s Bazaar. “I think in some respects, the fundamental issues are the same: we are looking to connect, and we’re wondering what in each other makes us human, and why we connect with that thing. We still can’t really answer that question in a succinct way, but now we’re faced with this problem we’ve created.”
Below, Jones — who also serves as an executive producer on the show — muses about her latest foray into television, her love of Japanese culture, and how she sees the evolution of the relationship between AI and making art.
What were some of the most important considerations you had in mind when bringing Suzie to life?
For me, everything has to come from a real place, or you have to at least act as if it is. Obviously, I’ve never lived with a robot in the near future, or had to lose a husband and child who had gone missing in a plane crash. But I think the themes of loneliness and grief are two of the most universal subjects. It’s an inevitability of being alive, to have both of those feelings. It doesn’t matter how many people you’re surrounded by — if you open yourself up to love, you will feel those two things.
I love the idea of exploring grief through the lens of a slightly more advanced AI, through the lens of a slightly more advanced Japan. It was just interesting to me because the things I’m attracted to are Trojan horse–type [projects] when it comes to the aesthetic world that then reveal a big treasure trove of themes and universality — and this show is precisely that. It’s extremely detailed, original and strange on its surface, and then underneath that, it’s very relatable.
Grief is a tricky emotion to play because it can easily come across as one-note. But as Suzie begins to go deeper into the conspiracy surrounding her husband, you are able to find these little moments of comedy in the face of tragedy—which, to your point, feels true to life. How would you describe the way Suzie copes with the loss of her loved ones?
In general, Suzie is a misanthropic, ornery person. She’s somebody who prides herself on being alone. She’s clearly a sensitive and vulnerable person who’s been hurt too many times, so when she’s confronted by anything new, she kind of shuts down. And of course, she’s sent on this journey where she has to befriend strangers. She’s at the mercy of these relationships that she’s making [for the first time], which is kind of her living nightmare. But I think her coping mechanism is humour — to be dry, to be somewhat shocking, to push people away, and to be funny in a way that makes people uncomfortable. And I am not like that. I’m somebody who wants people to feel included and comfortable — maybe to a fault — but she does not have that instinct at all.
But as things progress, I think she finds herself softening to very unlikely friendships and then becomes obsessed with the mystery, which is also something that feels very real and relatable. When you’re dealing with unimaginable loss, you need a focal point. And for her, I think it’s figuring out the truth about her husband, the truth about Sunny. Having to feel and experience the grief at all times in an overwhelming way, where she feels like she’s drowning, gives her purpose.
The fact that the novel on which this show is based was written by someone who is not Japanese lends itself to the feeling that this story is told largely through the perspective of an outsider. Even though this show fuses the past with the future and is, therefore, not set in a specific era, how did you and the rest of the creative team go about honouring the specificities of Japanese culture?
Katie, the showrunner, and Lucy [Tcherniak], the director, did a lot of that prior to me coming on board. But it’s so important for me, just as a person visiting a different place, that I am respectful of the culture that I’m coming into. I find that responsibility even more important in Japan, because of the way that Japan preserves its culture. Even if you feel like an outsider, even if you’re making something about an outsider, you have to have a certain respect for what you’re walking into. And I just happened to really love the culture, history, and tradition of Japan. It’s extremely rich and complicated. So I got to learn things along the way when I was living and working there.
But within the show, there are things that we pull out — the tear-seeking ceremony [in which people are literally brought together to cry together]; how people are so depressed that they stay in their rooms for a long time; the tradition of getting a KFC chicken bucket at Christmas, which a lot of people do in Japan. [We focused on] honouring today’s Japan and the things that define the culture in a way where it really highlights how different Suzie is from the world that she’s chosen for herself. She went there to sort of not engage, but unfortunately or fortunately — you be the judge — she’s forced to engage with the culture.
Joanna Sotomura performed with equipment that allowed her to provide the robot with her voice and facial expressions in real time, so it almost felt like you were acting with a real person. What was the experience of shooting with Sunny like for you? Did you ever reach a point in the shoot where you started to feel like you were interacting with a real, sentient being?
Thank God for Joanna. She’s so good. She really, in an emotional and a very practical way, animated Sunny, and I don’t know if I’m the kind of actor who could have just filled in those gaps without [her acting]. That actually made me feel slightly positive about how far we’ve come with AI, because I still very much needed a human being to make her sentient. But there were times when they would power her down — her little light would go off, and her whole face would go down. And I knew not to feel sad, but I still did. It’s amazing how little it takes for humans, including myself, to interact with something and decide that it’s worth our time, that it is sentient, and that it has feelings. You can’t help but feel something, even though it’s just a bunch of wires and metal.
What do you think AI says about our humanity beyond this need to connect? What does it say about where we are now as a society?
It’s a good question — a big question. I guess the best version of it is curiosity; the worst version of it is this insatiable, unfillable hole, which drives us towards innovation at any cost, and it’s in a way that could potentially destroy us. It feels mythological that we can’t see our own flaws, that we’re creating our own problem that we then have to solve. I think it does feel like a timeless issue.
But it does feel like we’re at a bit of a turning point where we’re going to have to decide how we live with AI. I don’t even think it’s a question anymore of if we want to live with AI, because it’s already being used. They already use it to mine our data — to decide what we want to watch, to eat, to buy. It’s just a matter of, like Sunny, will we humanise it? Will we animate it in a way where it’s irresistible?
Because right now, we’re talking about the ‘intellectual’ realm of [AI]. And eventually, it will have a body. It will be housed in something that’s irresistible and cute and seems so sentient that we won’t even be able to have a conversation about it, because it’s going to be so advanced in a visual way. Maybe this was always our destiny; maybe this is a perfect manifestation of our own deepest flaws and our deepest talents as humans. I don’t know. We’ll see.
What is your take on the evolving relationship between technology and the way we make art now?
People who work in the creative arts would say that we have a history of being undervalued, underpaid and lacking ownership in what we do. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true for music, film and TV. There were a couple glimmers of hope where people got to own what they made, and now we’re staring down the barrel of whether or not we can even own who we are, which is a very tricky subject. Apparently, you can’t copyright a human being, but you can [copyright] an AI. So what is that going to look like? Will actors have to create their own AI to then own and license out? There’s going to have to be some protections around people. There are things that have happened recently where people’s voices have been stolen from them.
Obviously, we’re one of many industries who are going to be impacted by AI; there are lots of things that probably won’t even exist because of AI. You could say that maybe Hollywood won’t exist, but I think it’s going to be a long time before people just don’t want to see any people onscreen. But there are other industries where I don’t even think people will care, unfortunately, that there’s no people on the other end of the phone, or whatever it is. I think most people don’t have the power or the access — [or] the understanding of what’s happening — to really weigh in on the issue until it’s too late, because it’s going to be so integrated with our lives. Not to be nihilistic, but it does feel like that’s coming.
It’s a realistic outlook. But unlike a lot of other sci-fi shows about the dangers of robots and AI, Sunny seems to have this undercurrent of optimism about how we can coexist, at least to a point, with rapidly evolving technology.
There’s some very questionable things that these robots in this near-future world do, but I think you’re meant to be left with this feeling that it’s complicated and that Suzie’s love and care for this new friend of hers — that just happens to be a robot — isn’t unwarranted. And much like our relationships with people, we are very flawed, and we can’t take for granted the fact that everything’s multifaceted and nuanced, and there’s not just one way to look at [this situation]. This is not a show that people will watch and say, ‘I don’t think [anything]’. I think they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, this show’s about how we’re screwed, because here comes AI in a big way’. Or, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of things that we haven’t really investigated, and there’s things that we take for granted as being wholly human that we might actually be able to fill the gap with AI’. I don’t think Sunny is a definitive cautionary tale.
Sunny is streaming now on Apple TV+, with a new episode released each Wednesday until 4 September.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Eugen Boglaru is an AI aficionado covering the fascinating and rapidly advancing field of Artificial Intelligence. From machine learning breakthroughs to ethical considerations, Eugen provides readers with a deep dive into the world of AI, demystifying complex concepts and exploring the transformative impact of intelligent technologies.
