Jason Sudeikis: ‘Ted Lasso isn’t a show, it’s a vibe’

How much of Jason Sudeikis is Ted Lasso, and how much of Ted Lasso is Jason Sudeikis? The extraordinarily strong hairline belongs to both, but that’s where the similarities start to swim apart and fuse together: Lasso wears a cheerfully thick moustache with his, while Sudeikis tends towards clean-shaven; since his 2003 start on SNL, Sudeikis has spent the last 18 years making people laugh, while Lasso’s attempts at humour (“Your body is like day-old rice – if it ain’t warmed up properly, something real bad could happen”) often whoosh over the heads of those around him. But they both seemingly spend an unusual amount of thought and care on the lesser-appreciated component parts that make a large organisation (a movie set; a football club) tick.

“I always felt bad for the boom guy or gal [on set],” Sudeikis says, Hollywood preened and gleaming in front of a so-unreal-it-might-as-well-be-greenscreen view of New York’s Hudson river. “It’s like, they’re holding that microphone up. And this is not easy to do. If you and I held our arms up like this …” and then we both hold our arms up in the air for about a minute while he talks about his years doing improv in Chicago, and he’s right, it isn’t fun. It isn’t fun at all.

Ted Lasso debuted on Apple TV+ in August last year, and sees the titular American football coach fly over to the UK to take the helm at fictional Premier League team AFC Richmond. Lasso is Kansas dinner party-polite, says “y’all” and “aw heck” a lot, but knows nothing about football: his coaching philosophy boils down to fun dances and just really loudly saying the word “BELIEVE”. “It’s the Chumbawamba energy of, you know, you get knocked down, then you get up again,” Las– no, sorry, Sudeikis explains of The Lasso Way, which is less to do with overlapping right-backs and more to do with the magic of teamwork.

It’s never really about the football, though: Lasso makes friends with the kit man. He learns the name of the cabby booked to drive him from the airport, and acts good on a promise to visit his father-in-law’s curry house. He supports the teenage girl who for some reason is always lurking outside his house doing keepy-uppies. Security guards giggle whenever he comes to work. The chairwoman hates him. The fans hate him. A lot of the players, who actually know what shape a football is, hate him. But everyone Ted Lasso has personally rained sunshine down on adores him.

Which perhaps makes him a strange character for Sudeikis to pivot to, given his career to date. Born in Virginia but raised in Kansas (home of Lasso’s cheerful twang), Sudeikis went through college as a curious mix of jock and theatre nerd (he attended college on a basketball scholarship; his maternal uncle is George Wendt, AKA Norm from Cheers) before an early career in improv took him first to Chicago, then Las Vegas. From there, he was drafted into the big lights of SNL, first as a writer before, two seasons in, breaking through as a performer.

After eight years playing presidents, newscasters and basically anyone who could turn slimy inside a suit, Sudeikis left, and embarked upon three years where he seemed to cameo in every show on Earth, with a line in sweet goofballs: Liz Lemon’s on-again off-again boyfriend Floyd in 30 Rock; It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s oblivious party guy Schmitty. After that came the leap to film, where he played a succession of frat-lite bad boys, including a pot dealer in We’re the Millers and Horrible Bosses’ shagger accountant Kurt Buckman. Basically: Sudeikis has spent a lot of time playing semi-horrible douchebags who have nice teeth. Now with Ted Lasso he’s playing the reverse: a sweet, thoughtful, charmingly flawed guy (with really nice teeth).

Football’s his cup of tea ... Sudeikis as Ted Lasso.
Football’s his cup of tea … Sudeikis as Ted Lasso. Photograph: Apple

“I personally didn’t want to play a buffoon, or use our time and our scripts to humanise a bastard – that had been done,” Sudeikis explains in his deep, rich, placelessly American accent. “Ted, the character: he’s looking for the best parts of life.”

Ted Lasso’s sweetness took a second to stick. The first two episodes of the show – based on an advert for US network NBC Sports, a doomed TV pitch if ever there was one – hinted at a nice if by-the-numbers sitcom that would flame out as soon as everyone coupled up, Jim-and-Pam style, and the actor playing the main character got a more lucrative blockbuster offer. The main joke, for a good while, seemed to be: “What if an American drinks a cup of tea?” There’s a syrupy corniness at the heart of Ted Lasso, for sure – for some reason, “really good buskers” seems to be one of the show’s running themes.

This fits into the prevailing mood. There has been a movement for wholesome comedy in recent years – arguably starting with the US Office, picking up speed during the Parks and Recreation and The Good Place era and finding a natural resting point with Schitt’s Creek. The early signs were that Ted Lasso was more of the same: low-jeopardy, soft-edged comedy to fall asleep to. Not quite a finger in the face – too confrontational! – but at least a sternly worded letter addressed to Seinfeld’s famous “No hugging, no learning” mantra. Yes hugging. Yes learning. And then: hugging again.

But slowly, Lasso started to take its own shape, becoming more textured and meaningful; niceness with an end, instead of niceness for the sake of niceness. A locked-down audience began bingeing the show, and by awards season Lasso was in the running for every major gong. Sudeikis won a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild award and has been nominated for an Emmy, while the series as a whole scored a Peabody award “for offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity … in a moment when the nation needs inspiring models of kindness.”

The larks ascending ... Sudeikis with Tina Feye and Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live.
The larks ascending … Sudeikis with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live. Photograph: NBCUniversal/Getty

Yet more overlap between the character and the actor playing him: at the season two premiere last week, Sudeikis showed up in a “Jadon & Marcus & Bukayo” shirt in support of the England players who had experienced racist abuse following the team’s Euro 2020 final loss – a total Lasso move.

“A thing I have felt for a long time is that the worst version of, like, ‘a human man’ is a guy who is ignorant but arrogant,” Sudeikis explains. “And so we wanted to play a guy that was ignorant, yes, but also curious – and that’s a subtle touch.”

Sudeikis traces that quality back all the way to the start of his career, working in the service industry. “Whether it be retail in a grocery store, or Blockbuster Video, you have all sorts of people coming through,” he says. “And at the checkout counter, the customer brings in all this energy, and you’re kind of like: ‘Why are you mad at me? We haven’t interacted long enough for you to be this cantankerous with me!’ So you start to piece it together. I remember watching couples – you know, someone wanted to rent Independence Day and someone wanted to rent When Harry Met Sally, and then they’re fighting about it. Like, OK: both are worthwhile movies to watch, but you’re not fighting about the movie.”

Ted is more than a lovable customer-service people-pleaser, standing up for ideologies and against unfairness whenever he can. “Michael Keaton played these guys, Tom Hanks played these guys, Jimmy Stewart played this type of guy. It might be vogue or whatever, but they are real people.”

Solidarity ... Sudeikis in support of Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka at the premiere of the second season of Ted Lasso.
Solidarity … Sudeikis in support of Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka at the premiere of the second season of Ted Lasso. Photograph: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

It helps that, by writing and creating the series, Sudeikis gets to be a bastard through other outlets – hardman-with-a-yoga addiction Roy Kent, or steely womanboss Rebecca Welton. “With this show – being a writer, creator, and being on set for most scenes – those parts of me play all the parts in the show: I get to try to harmonise with all these other voices, which has always been my favourite thing to do. That’s the only reason I got to stay at SNL: not because of the sketches I was writing, but, because those first couple of years, I enjoyed rewriting with people – finding someone with that specific voice and being like: ‘you try this, you try that’. It’s a fun way to exercise, and exorcise, your demons.”

One demon to exorcise is Ted’s divorce, which last season played out on screen a few weeks ahead of the news breaking of Sudeikis’s own split from actor Olivia Wilde. Though the real-life timeline of the celebrity split (the couple broke it off in November 2020, with Wilde now reportedly dating former One Direction star Harry Styles) couldn’t be seen in the first series, the similarities help overlap the actor and the character in the second: watching Lasso as a newly divorced but longly heartbroken man thousands of miles away from his family, just like Sudeikis was during filming, adds another layer of humanity behind that aww-shucks smile.

There are other problems to overcome this year: Ted bristles with the addition of a sports psychologist to the backroom staff; and struggling to motivate a listless Championship team, he activates a monstrous alter ego to yell at them all until they run. We also see bigger storylines from the supporting players – chairwoman Rebecca’s exciting dating life post-divorce, Roy and Keeley’s very cute early relationship, the evolution of downtrodden kitman Nate the Great. Often, you don’t even need Lasso on screen for it to be a successful Lasso scene. “It’s called Ted Lasso,” Sudeikis explains, “but it’s not a show, it’s not a character: it’s a vibe, and the show trickles down as spillover from that vibe.”

Coach trip ... Brendan Hunt, Cristo Fernández and Jason Sudeikis in Ted Lasso.
Clubbing together … Brendan Hunt, Cristo Fernández and Jason Sudeikis in Ted Lasso. Photograph: Colin Hutton/Apple

Sudeikis personified the word “vibe” following his win at this year’s Golden Globes, drawing raised eyebrows and Twitter criticism for his acceptance speech. It saw him – sleepy-eyed and in a tie-dye hoodie – burbling about reading Tolstoy to his children before fellow nominees pulled the slit-throat gesture at him to stop. Some worried it undermined the seriousness of industry awards; others wondered aloud if a woman could get away with the same behaviour.

“It was [children’s book writer] Jon J Muth, not Tolstoy – I’m not reading my kid Tolstoy, I’ll set the record straight on that,” he says of his speech. “Also, I wasn’t stoned. My eyes are red because it was 2.30 in the morning and I may have had something to drink. But I was genuinely shocked [by the reaction]. At first I had on, you know, a nice suit, a shirt and tie. And I was like: this is so silly. People are going through it. [So then] I’m sitting there with basketball shorts on and the top of a nice Tom Ford suit. And I’m like: come on. Just wear the hoodie … it felt comfortable, and it felt good.”

If you’ve seen Ted Lasso bring a plastic army man to a press conference because his son sent him one in a care package from home, you’ll recognise the spirit of wearing a tie-dye hoodie to the Golden Globes. It might not have been an orthodox tactic – and it might have rubbed some people up the wrong way – but still, somehow, it worked. Perhaps the line between Sudeikis and Lasso isn’t so wide after all.

Ted Lasso season two is streaming now on Apple TV+

source: theguardian.com