By season 3 of Loot, the Wells Foundation crew has their vibe down: rich-people chaos, nonprofit panic, and Maya Rudolph floating through it all in increasingly unhinged luxury. But the secret sauce is everyone orbiting her, which is where Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Ron Funches come in—she as laser-focused COO Sofia, he as human golden retriever Howard—two people who are nothing like their characters and also exactly like them.
For Rodriguez, coming back for a third round isn’t so much “finding” Sofia as checking back in with a very stressed alternate universe version of herself. “I think it’s the people you work with, more importantly,” she says. “I’m lucky and blessed to work with extreme professionals and iconic people who really take their craft seriously. But we really care for each other. We have a deep-rooted care for each other, and we also know that we both have a love for our craft.”
That mutual affection shows up everywhere—from the way scenes land to the way the cast basically uses the set as a group hang. “I love when I get to see Stephanie and we talk about musical theater. I love when I see Ron and Joel and we’re talking about games, Pokémon, Marvel Rivals… me and Maya, we’re talking about fashion,” Rodriguez says. “Our chemistry rocks on camera because we rooted it and solidified it throughout these years.”
Sofia, of course, is wound tighter than a billionaire’s NDA. Rodriguez, however, not so much. “Ron can attest to that. I am a fool and a half,” she laughs. “I am silly backstage. It does not rub off. If anything, I run away from her. If I were in real life to get a chance to say to Sofia, I’d be like, ‘Girl, you got to smell the flowers.’”
If Rodriguez is the farthest from her character, Funches claims the opposite. “One of my favorite parts about being Howard is that I show up to work pretty much like Howard,” he says. “She’s probably the furthest from her character and I’m the closest, because I’ll show up to work in my regular clothes and they’re just like, ‘Oh, are you already ready? You’re on set.’ We dress alike. We’re pretty much the same thing.”
The writers lean into that. They’ve been stealing from Funches’s life for a while now, with his season 2 pro-wrestling storyline lifted almost directly from his real side quest in the ring. “They take a lot of our real-life loves or situations that happened to us and ask if we’re okay with using them in the show,” he explains. “Usually a few months before we start shooting, they’ll invite us into the writers’ room, present what they’re thinking, and ask for our input.”
Even the throwaway lines are precision-engineered. Two favorites from this season—“country musician Roger Clinton has a brother?” and “There’s a ghost in the toilet and he wants to talk to you”—as writer-born, but tailored so specifically they might as well have been pulled off his stand up. “They never write a joke that can be interchangeable,” he says. “There’s not a joke that comes out of my mouth that would sound natural coming out of Sofia’s or Nicholas’s. They’re all from a unique perspective. So you don’t know: was that improvised, was that written?”
Then there’s the nude beach episode with Henry Winkler. Onscreen, it’s sun-kissed freedom. Offscreen, it was January. “They made it look like paradise and fun,” Funches says. “But trust me, they were cold and not feeling it. For all the background, all the extras that were working that day, they really put in a lot of work and they were pretty much butt naked.”
Cold or not, Winkler made it a joy. Rodriguez remembers him as “such a father figure… such a sweet and generous person,” the kind of guy who kisses your forehead between setups and means it. Funches loves that the Fonz now just… shows up in his regular life. “I run into him at dinner on occasion now. He’ll come up and say hi to me. It’s one of the best things in my life,” he says. Winkler also apparently lives in his comments section. “If I post up comedy, he’s one of the first people to leave many comments about how funny I am.”
Meanwhile, off set, both actors are busy. Funches is on the road with standup; Rodriguez is rolling out new music, including her sleek single “To Tango,” with more on the way. And in the middle of all the jokes, Loot keeps jabbing at real-world targets—AI, billionaire “philanthropy,” even the grinding reality of public media budgets—with the kind of bite that sneaks in behind Rudolph’s megayacht grin.
So the show is silly and warm and occasionally very naked. But underneath, there’s a quiet argument about what people owe each other when they have too much. If you’re going to tackle that, it helps to have a cast that actually likes being in the same room. On Loot, you can feel it. And if you forget, there’s always Henry Winkler on a cold beach to remind you what commitment looks like.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
