Rashida Jones asks what makes us human

For someone who rode the school bus with Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Rashida Jones is remarkably down-to-earth. Growing up in Los Angeles, the daughter of Mod Squad actress Peggy Lipton and legendary music producer Quincy Jones, she was so steeped in the celebrity world that it took her a while to realize that the people around her—Frank Sinatra, Sidney Poitier, Michael Jackson—were just as iconic as they were. It was a heady environment that would have led most young people (say, her bus companions) to get lost in the bubble of celebrity. Instead, Jones did her homework and got into Harvard, where she studied religion and philosophy before finding fame in her own right, thanks to sitcoms like The Office and Parks and Recreation. In many of her roles, as in life, she projects a dry, insightful intelligence that cuts through the absurdity around her. She’s a pretty good guide to the celebrity world.

That same quality of sanity amid madness is evident in her latest project, Sunny, a sci-fi series coming to Apple TV+ this week. Based on a novel by Colin O’Sullivan, the series, created by Katie Robbins, follows an American woman named Suzie (Jones) living in Kyoto. After her husband and son are presumed dead in a plane crash, she is given a plucky and eager-to-please robot servant named Sunny, who insists on helping her clean up the mess in her life. Suzie begins to realize that her husband wasn’t the simple refrigeration engineer he claimed to be, and Sunny might be the key to figuring out who he really was. In the vein of The Flight Attendant, the series throws Suzie into a strange and perilous puzzle box involving artificial intelligence, yakuza assassins, and a condescending Japanese mother-in-law.

“I’ve never had the chance to play this kind of role before, someone who’s pushing a mystery forward and has her own baggage that she’s carrying with her,” Jones told me recently. She was on a video call from her home office in Los Angeles, where she lives with her longtime partner, Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, and their son. She wore a pink Hasty Pudding hat and aviator glasses, and sat in front of bright green armoires decorated with hand-painted birds and flowers. “I’m in my middle-aged eccentric moment, where I decided I wanted everything to be colorful, after years of mid-century Scandinavian minimalism and parsimony,” she explained. In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, we talked about robots, the state of Hollywood, 11th-century Indian theology and the time Michael Jackson's chimp, Bubbles, bit her on the hand.

You have a lot of scenes with Sunny. What was it like playing opposite a robot?

The robot was very high maintenance. It took a lot of people to make it come alive. There was someone who controlled the major spatial movements. There was someone who did the software for the screen on the face. Sometimes we had an actor who only had hands, which allowed him to articulate more with his fingers. And then we had the amazing Joanna Sotomura, who plays Sunny. She was in a tent with a giant helmet and a bright light on her face, and she did all of Sunny's expressions and said all of the words. So he translated her expressions, but that meant I was never in a room with Joanna.

You starred alongside the Muppets in the 2011 film The Muppets. Did that give you any experience to draw on?

Yes! I loved working with the Muppets and I remember feeling like, on the fifth day of shooting, I was having a full-blown conversation with Kermit. I wasn’t looking at his puppet, I was just talking to the hand in the felt puppet. And I was thinking, “Oh, this is what it’s going to be like when AI becomes a reality.” I remember having that thought years ago. It doesn’t take much to awaken your senses: a little mouth movement, a voice, a personality. It’s so simple that way. So, yeah, it was a great training ground and there were moments where I really felt the essence of Sunny.

It’s interesting that this series, which is about our relationship with technology, is coming to Apple TV+. Of course, Apple is the company that is most intimately involved in most of our lives. I’ve also read that in Apple shows, the bad guys can’t use iPhones. Did you get any direction like that?

No, but I've heard that too. You can't vilify the phone. You can't have a broken phone. But it's funny, because with shows like this and Severance, it feels like Apple is expressing its own feelings about what they are: Wait, are we the big, expensive, scary tech overlord? Or are we the ones with good intentions, and someone else comes along and changes the course of the good thing we were supposed to do? At least they're getting therapy about it, that's how I feel. To me, the irony isn't lost in the fact that Sunny is this round, shiny, white thing that invades my house and permeates my life. I have one of these things called an iPhone. Obviously, this story is a story in its own right, because it's set in the near future and there are villains who aren't necessarily tech. But we have to accept the fact that technology is developing and learning much faster than we ever imagined, and we are forced to ask ourselves this existential question: what does it mean to be human?

This is a very current topic, especially in Hollywood. AI was at the center of the actors' and writers' strikes last year. There was this conflict between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. What do you think about the role that AI could play in entertainment?

I’ve heard people say, “This is really scary. We have no idea how destructive this is going to be on so many industries.” And I’ve heard people say, “That’s what they say about every new technology, including printing. But printing has never learned anything we haven’t taught it.” That’s what scares me. Like the internet, it’s going to be the Wild West, and at some point it’s going to be destructive enough that it has to be reduced to some kind of consent-based operation. I don’t know how they’re going to do that. I really feel like the darkest people are now in control of the internet, from biowarfare to the Dark Web. I’ve always been obsessed with stories of technology growing and fear of technology.

I would mention The Social Network, about the birth of Facebook, in which you play one of Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers. Is that something that attracted you to this project as well?

Yes, but precisely because the script took a point of view. We didn't even know to what extent [social media] The story would have permeated our lives at the time the movie came out. But it all had an origin story. This person had a reason, a determination to do something because of his own situation. He was rejected. Let me deal with that by controlling the forces that rejected me. You understand this person. You identify with him. You might have compassion for him. And that's exactly the kind of person who caused these things to get out of control.

Sunny has a lot of elements besides robots: yakuza mobsters, heartbreak. What drew you to this film?

I've never really played a lead role in a show like this, where the story is told through the quest of one person. I figured I was big enough, up for the challenge. I like the feeling that this character, unlike me, is isolated. She's a bit of a misanthrope. She came to Japan and found her own people, her family, and then she lost them very suddenly. It feels like a show about finding your place. And the grief part interests me. Grief has shaped my life a lot in the last five years, because I lost my mother five years ago. I became a mother, and then seven months later, I lost my mother. That pressure in both directions has changed me forever.

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