The actor and co-creator discusses the show that has secured a record-breaking number of Emmy nominations.
Ted Lasso ’s status as a pop culture phenomenon is something that Jason Sudeikis did not see coming. “It was a shock,” he admitted as we spoke over Zoom a few weeks before the show garnered a record 20 Emmy nominations. The first season landed on Apple AAPL TV+ in August 2020 and quickly caught on as one of the go-to shows, distracting people from the global pandemic. The comedy, which started life as a TV ad, took on a life of its own. It was renewed for a second season five days after the first episode premiered on the streamer. The show, co-created by Sudeikis, sees him play the titular lead, an American football coach given the job of managing a struggling soccer team in London. As the second season premieres on Friday, July 23, 2021, we discussed the journey and whether he’d ever invest in a soccer team. Simon Thompson: It genuinely seems like no one expected Ted Lasso to have the impact that it did. Jason Sudeikis: It was a shock. All of us behind the scenes were very proud of the end product and how we came about it. The storytelling was intentional, the work ethic behind it and not being cynical towards the process or apathetic towards it as well as trying not to let our egos get in the way. That’s all the stuff we had control over. The show’s reception was out of our hands, so the positive response was as surprising to us as anyone, if not more so. I thought someone would like it. Simon Thompson: How would you describe the feeling of something you co-created catching on so fast? Sudeikis: I’m from Kansas, so growing up, I got my music recommendations from Rolling Stone. If Rolling Stone is writing about something, it means people on the coasts have known about it for years. I got The Strokes way later than anyone on the Lower East Side. I had no way to anticipate that a ton of people would know or care about this. It caught on all over the place. I’m sincerely flattered that people have picked up on so many of the themes, so many of the little touches and nuances. When we were writing it, we definitely did it in a way so that people would get it, but if they were to watch it again, people would see how we’ve seeded things through it.
