‘Sunny’ Star Rashida Jones Isn’t Afraid to Be Replaced by Artificial Intelligence — ‘but I Could Be’

Even as the multi-tasking talent at the center of a dizzying genre blend, Rashida Jones has perspective.

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In Apple TV+’s “Sunny,” the beloved “ Parks & Rec ” actor executive produces and stars as Suzie, a spit-fire American ex-pat suddenly living and grieving alone in a futuristic version of Japan. The series’ first two episodes, which started streaming Wednesday July 10 (new installments release weekly through September 4), introduce an investigation into a mysterious plane crash that forces Suzie to grapple with the shocking disappearance of both her young song and husband, Masa ( Hidetoshi Nishijima, “Drive My Car” ).

Created by Katie Robbins, this darkly funny sci-fi thriller simultaneously explores the shadowy innerworkings of a tech company where Suzie’s late spouse used to work. That plot casts our smart-mouthed outsider — who for better or worse hates robots — opposite an adorable, artificially intelligent home companion designed specifically for her by Masa. Part grief counselor, part detective sidekick, and one big question mark for Suzie, the titular Sunny is the heart of the show, but it’s the pair’s odd-coupling that drives Robbins’ ambitious exploration of the classic genre themes that in 2024 are finally becoming tangible threats .

“I was shockingly so happy to see her,” Jones told IndieWire of reuniting with her anthropomorphic co-star, wheels and all, for the show’s premiere in Tokyo. “It had been two years. I just hadn’t seen her in so long. In a way, that experience made me feel a little bit hopeful about the timeline around this particular type of AI. It wasn’t like acting with a person.”

Voiced and remotely acted by Joanna Sotomura, the namesake robo-cutie (which, Jones agrees, looks just a tad “jacked”) wasn’t easy to manage on set. “The Office” favorite describes a difficult but rewarding tech-centric production, complete with an engineering team, that helped humans make the most creative use of cutting-edge innovation that Jones said still “isn’t quite there yet.” That’s a good thing, according to the actor, who seems to have had her eyes wide open when agreeing to lead a send-up of Big Tech for a company like Apple.

“Everybody was scared of the camera when it was a new technology and it was going to steal our souls,” the writer/director/producer/performer said, when asked about the potential uses for AI in Hollywood. “But then you find a way to integrate it and you use it for your art.”

“I do have a bit of fear about it, and not that I’m afraid to be replaced, but I could be, I could easily be,” Jones continued, noting how a generational divide can impact your willingness to engage with AI. “The question is, will it continue to be a tool or will it replace us? I don’t know.”

Speaking with IndieWire, the “Sunny” star considered the good, the bad, and the unforeseeable of making machines designed to outpace humanity. Jones also reflected on the state of multilingual series and network comedies, as well as the addictive elements of TikTok, the predictive qualities of science fiction (remember, she wrote on “ Black Mirror ”), and the existential query that underlines it all: Sunny, what makes us human?

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

IndieWire: So, an expat exploring Japan through a sci-fi thriller. What specifically about Suzie drew you to “Sunny”?

Rashida Jones: I was interested in doing something new, something I hadn’t done before, taking a big swing. I’m a pretty affable person. I play a lot of affable, nice supportive friends and girlfriends and wives, and so it was nice to play a bit of a misanthrope.

“Sunny” has such a specific feel — blending dark comedy and mystery with an adorable robot and this retro color palette. As an executive producer, what part did you play in building that world?

It was very well realized by the time I came on board, but I think an EP’s job is to make sure that you’re constantly calibrating tone and that the aesthetic and the hopes and the wishes and the dreams of the creators make it to the screen. So just making sure that everything kind of works together synergistically in a way that feels like the show knows what it is when it comes out.

How much does genre impact the projects you approach?

I’ve never felt like there’s a genre I don’t like. For me, it starts with the relationship and the reality of the character, and then you throw them into whatever world that is, whether it’s action or thriller or comedy. To me, it doesn’t matter. If the characterization feels real, that’s the most essential thing for me.

That being said, I’d never really done a mystery thriller, and there is this sort of propulsive element that was challenging. It’s kind of a new thing where you’re playing the way in for the audience, and so you have to hold the tension in a way that helps them hold the tension, and that was new for me for sure.

The subject matter is tense in and of itself. You’ve got this show about AI coming at a time when Hollywood, as you’ve put it, is in a bit of a “pressure cooker.” Do you feel any anxiety approaching sci-fi, with the predictive nature people assign to it?

Yeah, we’ve been doing that for so long. We’re sort of litigating our own feelings about technology and sci-fi. For decades and decades and decades, we’re fascinated by it, and I think it feels like this weird psychological, psychoanalytical exercise where we’re trying to figure out our own humanity by externalizing it, programming it, seeing how far we can push it, training it, iterating all the stuff to figure out if we can get to the sort of essence of why we’re human and what makes us different as a species than any other species. But we’re doing it in this very dangerous, active way where we might even create something that surpasses our expectation or surpasses our humanity. It’s almost like it feels like there’s this weird dramatic tension where some people want that to happen. It’s like they want it to surprise us. They want it to feel sentient because it feels like a wish fulfillment. Kind of fantasy/nightmare.

There’s this great line that Sunny has where she says, “Robots are expressions of their creators.” Do you agree with that idea? Can robots be art?

I guess it depends on what you think art is, but yes, I think any form of technology is a sort of expression of its creator. There’s no way it couldn’t be. But the problem is once you’ve expressed it, if part of the expression is its iterative nature, it can start to do things that are not an expression of you. That’s sort of the problem. But I do think, yes, if you look at the history of innovation, it does feel like we’ve created things that feel like a collective expression of culture or humanity at any given time.

You end up in a feedback loop too, right? Of tech imitating art and vice versa? I think about something the “Black Mirror” episode you wrote, where you had real companies prototyping the social ratings system you wrote into “Nosedive.” Did you ever see any of those apps? What did you make of that?

Yes, actually! It was wild. Wild but not surprising. While we were writing, we came across an article. Charlie Brooker, talk about predictive. He just always knows [things] before they’re going to happen, but it was happening in China. There was this social rating system that was coming up there. Now, we kind of have it everywhere already. Even in America, we’re rating each other constantly with likes and thumbs down and hearts and comments, and we are not that far from that. But again, it makes sense. It’s like it’s our nature, our flawed nature that we can’t escape, which is that we judge each other. We want to be liked by each other. We want the social hierarchy. We want to play the game. And now that most people in the world are sort of on their phones, that sort of survival of the fittest becomes this nuanced interpersonal dynamic where you’re looking at each other with this giant filter and judging each other. It’s weird.

In that vein, you’re not on TikTok. Is there a reason for that?

I scroll through TikTok. I really like it, but I think I’ve worked my whole life to care less about what people think. So I don’t know if I trust myself enough to not be completely subsumed by TikTok because it’s so entertaining. It’s so incredibly entertaining, and I’m not even on it as a creator. I just love being able to see all these different perspectives and jokes and dances. But I’m also terrified by it.

How do you feel about AI in the creative process? Obviously, that was a big subject with the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes.

Yeah, I think there’s an inevitability here. It’s already here. It’s already here when it comes to tech and tech companies already use AI to mine our data to train on our data. That’s already happening. But when it comes to the creative process, I think there’s one school of thought where people say, yeah, everybody’s so scared. Everybody was scared of the camera when it was a new technology and it was going to steal our souls. But then you find a way to integrate it and you use it for your art. I do think a younger generation will look at AI and know how to use it in an iterative way that actually helps their creative process. I think maybe as a Gen X-er, I might be too old to fully adopt it into my life because I do have a bit of fear about it, and not that I’m afraid to be replaced, but I could be, I could easily be. But yeah, I think there will be uses for it. The question is, will it continue to be a tool or will it replace us? I don’t know.

Is there any specific part of the creative process where you’re like, “Yes, I would like to see that part automated?”

Do we ever have to fill out a form again? Why do we have to fill out forms? Every time you go to a new doctor, you, by hand, fill out the same form that you filled out 20 other times. AI’s got to have a solution for that, right?

You got a chance to reunite with the actual Sunny on the red carpet recently. What’s it like doing publicity with a character like that?

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I was shockingly so happy to see her because it had been two years. I just hadn’t seen her in so long. In a way, that experience made me feel a little bit hopeful about the timeline around this particular type of AI. It wasn’t like acting with a person. Joanna Sotomura, who plays the voice and does the expressions of Sunny, was for me the Sunny because she was simultaneously creating this character as I got to act with her. But everything else was very difficult. It was hard to make Sunny function. We had a really good robotics team. We had really good stuff happen in post, but it didn’t feel like, “Oh wow, it’s almost here!” It’s not quite there yet, which is good.

You shot on location in Japan. Was that experience what you expected?

No, I think I didn’t realize the depths in which I would love Japan. I knew I loved it and I loved it as a tourist. And then, there’s something about living somewhere for six months and figuring out where you get your groceries and where you’re going to work out or whatever. And just getting around, that changes your relationship with the place. Then being able to travel all over the country, really, my love just deepened for the people and the culture and the food and the nature and the art and the fashion. I loved it even more than I thought I would.

“Sunny” comes on the heels of a bunch of multilingual TV successes, including Apple TV+’s “Pachinko.” How do you see the international market changing television?

Well, that was the big promise of globalization, that we would all be able to watch the same thing on the same day, which we do and we can. I do feel like it’s so great to have “Pachinko” and “Drops of God” and all these shows where they’re multilingual. There’s a real deep exploration of a culture through the lens of the filmmaker or the creator in a way where you just might not have had access to either the art of that country or the history of that country. There is something so cool about being able to have this intimate take. I think especially for “Sunny,” Suzie is an outsider. She’s a foreigner and she’s in a foreign land and she lives in Japan. And I feel like that way in for an American to experience Japan, it’s a unique privilege of art in a way where you can give somebody that access couched in a telling of a story.

Did you have any big discoveries for yourself, archivally, either Japanese cinema or Japanese TV, that you found yourself really falling in love with while you were there?

I did do a Kurosawa deep dive before, which was fun. Gosh, I can’t remember anything. This was two and a half years ago… I watched “Drive My Car” and I watched that filmmaker’s other movie, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which was so good. Oh, and I re-watched “Shoplifters”! Yeah. I did a little bit of Japanese film tour and again deepened my love for [Japanese culture]. Obviously, I watched “Spirited Away.” I did a lot of work on the Miyazaki front. Yeah, I’ve always loved Japan and Japanese cinema, and now I love their music.

There’s one thing that they do. We do it in the show, but there’s this thing that they have that used to be on the radio every day, and it was mandatory called “radio taisō” which is this workout. It’s like a ten-minute workout that the entire country would do. It’s on a Japanese playlist now that I have, which is kind of silly because it’s an instructor and a little classical piece of music, but anytime you play it for a Japanese friend, they just laugh because everybody knows it in the country. It’s kind of cool. It’s like a little dance.

A couple people online have mentioned that Sunny is kind of… jacked? What was your first impression when you guys met?

She does look jacked, for sure . She was cute and jacked! But plot wise, she kind of has to be because it belies some potential threat. But yeah, she was cute and jacked. It was like a super interesting combination between the two things. She has this really smiley sweet face and six-pack abs. She’s an interesting little creature.

“Sunny” is also an adaptation, although it veers significantly from the source material. These days with fewer and fewer people actually reading, how much of an obligation do you think any given TV creator feels to stick to the source? Or are those just two totally separate audiences at this point?

It’s really up to the creator. The book is very different from the series in this case, but if it brings people back to reading, that’s great, obviously. But I think it’s a place to start. And I know that people get very picky about things that they love, that they read and how they’re adapted onto the screen, which I completely understand. But it’s a very abstract relationship between the two things. It really just depends on the creator and what they saw in the source material that made them want to make a show. I’ve adapted myself. There’s so much interior in a book that you have to find ways to make that active and make that sort of dramatic, which is challenging. You can’t always be so close to the book because you can’t be inside someone’s head.

The idea of grief being explored through AI is something that we’ve seen done a lot. What do you make of that evolved artistic iteration, entombing an emotion in a robot? Does that strike you as hopeful or sad?

There is something just so inherently human about grief and loneliness. It’s coming for us all, and we’re all looking to connect. I think there is this sort of unfilled longing of being a person and being alive, and we’re always looking for ways to fill that hole. Tech is just one of many, many things that we use to try to fill that hole. We try to fill it with people. We fill it with distractions. We can fill it with God. We fill it with family. We fill it with addictions. And not to say that tech is an addiction, but it’s just another tool that we’re using to try to solve somewhat of an inevitable, endless problem.

Some of these same themes are explored in the show “Upload” from Greg Daniels. Did you and Greg ever have an opportunity to talk about this kind of thing?

I never saw that show. People were uploaded into the cloud or something? Is that what it is?

Yeah, it’s like an afterlife that they put into a digital projection.

Yeah, no, I never watched that! We never talked about tech or the future, Greg and I. We should.

In the spirit of network comedy, “Parks & Recreation” is getting this renewed love, which is very deserved. “The Office,” of course, is experiencing that as well. Do you see another heyday for sitcoms like that coming down the pipeline for network anytime soon?

I hope so. I think comedy is eternal. Everybody needs to laugh. The question is what makes them laugh and what makes them continue to tune in. And also, the business of show is very much up for debate in terms of what the actual structure of the business looks like right now. But I do believe everything is cyclical, and I think there will be a time. It’s, to me, no mistake that people still watch “The Office” and “Parks” as they do, even teenagers. There is something undeniable about spending that much time with characters that we need. We need that. So I hope they continue to make shows like that. Yes, please.

We’ve talked about the idea that pretty much all of these narrative explorations with robots are getting to the idea of what makes us human. Do you have an answer to that question?

[Laughs.] What makes us human?

Sorry! I know it’s pointed.

I think weirdly, and I don’t think I’m being lazy here, but grief and loneliness feel so human to me. Oh, that’s not true. I guess animals experience grief and loneliness too. But maybe to be sentient is to be lonely and to have grief? And I’m not sure, but can they program AI to really know what it feels like to lose someone or to feel all alone in the world? And also, how do you prove that? How does an AI express that in a way that feels familiar to humans? That’s a big one. I don’t know.

We’re not going to crack it in this interview.

No, we’re not going to fix it today. [Laughs.] It’s just a proposal, a question. Maybe we’ll answer it. Maybe we won’t.

“Sunny” is now streaming on Apple TV+. New episodes released weekly through September 4.