#Jay Duplass co-stars with Sandra Oh in ‘The Chair’ on Netflix

Jay Duplass was an eyewitness to cancel culture when his “Transparent” co-star, Jeffrey Tambor, was fired from the Amazon series in 2018 following allegations of sexual harassment.

In “The Chair,” premiering Friday (Aug. 20) on Netflix, Duplass plays English professor Bill Dobson, whose mocking Nazi salute during class goes viral on social media (memes, etc.) and sets off a campus firestorm.

“It’s been my observation, and I’ve been very close to one particular cancel-culture moment, that it’s not just the initial event — it’s the handling of the event after the fact and more of a case of whether that person can use the rope to climb out or hang themselves,” Duplass, 48, told The Post. “There are several turning points where Bill chooses well or poorly. It’s the person’s outlook on life and willingness to open up to pain they may have caused, not just for inciting the event but perhaps what they’ve done in the past, as well.”

The six-episode Netflix dramedy was co-created and co-written by actress Amanda Peet and stars Sandra Oh as Ji-Yoon Kim, a 46-year-old single mother who’s just been named the first-ever female chair of the English department at Pemberton, an Ivy League-ish university that’s fallen on tough financial times.

Before she can get comfortable in her new office, Ji-Yoon is tasked by stuffy Dean Larson (David Morse) with ridding her department of several senior professors (played by Bob Balaban, Holland Taylor and Ron Crawford) whose class enrollments are way down or nearly non-existent. She also finds herself locked in a battle over her choice for a distinguished lecturer: she wants her charismatic Pemberton colleague Yaz McKay (Nana Mensah) for the position, while the trustees want … wait for it … David Duchovny. Yes, that David Duchovny (“He almost got his PhD,” Larson says).

And then there’s Bill, whose wife died the year before and who’s just packed his daughter off to college overseas. “I think the way Amanda had originally written him in the script was something in the ballpark of ‘an incredibly respected and published star professor who happens to look more like a teenage surf punk and doesn’t give a s–t what he looks like or smells like,’” Duplass said. “Amanda talked to me a lot about the double-edged sword of Bill’s irreverence. He really knows how to infuse fun and inspiration inside academia, which absolutely needs to happen…but he also has a certain amount of white male privilege that he’s about to become painfully aware of.

“It’s a testament to the murky waters Amanda is swimming through vis a vis the cancel-culture situation. I don’t think anybody is completely falling down on either side of the debate. As much as we know we’re treading into dangerous territory we’re trying to capture the diversity of every human being and the singularity of this approach … while trying to further the conversation.”

There’s also romantic tension between Bill and Ji-Yoon, who’s having trouble communicating with her young daughter, Ju-Hee (Everly Carganilla), who she adopted from Mexico and who is resistant to learning about Asian culture — but adores Bill, with whom she shares several fun scenes (including his accompanying her to her cousin’s birthday party).

The series was filmed this past January through March in Pittsburgh at several schools — including Chatham University and the University of Pittsburgh. And it was brutally cold. “To go there in the middle of winter in peak COVID was scary but so worth it,” Duplass said. “Several times when we were shooting [scenes] in a faculty meeting or in an office and there were a couple of windows open, you could look outside and see like two feet of snow there. It just brought such an incredibly realistic feeling.”

He also reserved a lot of praise for Taylor, 78, for her portrayal of feisty professor Joan Hambling.

“After I saw the first cut I immediately felt like she’s the secret weapon of the entire series, he said. “Amanda’s writing of the role of Joan was so funny that I never thought anybody could match what it felt like in the script — but I think Holland doubled down on it and made it that much funnier.”