The British actor and soccer non-fan scored his first Emmy nomination playing a sharp soccer coach in the hit Apple TV+ comedy.
Voting is underway for the 73rd Primetime Emmys, and this week we’re talking to several first-time Emmy nominees. The awards will be presented Sept.19 on CBS. The first season of “Ted Lasso” follows a sunny American who moves to England to take on a quintessentially British institution: the Premier League. Nick Mohammed, the British actor who plays Ted’s underdog assistant coach Nate, is about to follow the opposite trajectory. His first trip to the United States will be to attend next month’s Emmy Awards, honoring the best of American television. (Assuming there’s an in-person ceremony, of course.) Mohammed was one of seven “Ted Lasso” stars to receive Emmy nods this year, among the 20 total the Apple TV+ series received, the most of any comedy. He was nominated for best supporting actor in a comedy, and he will compete with three of his co-stars in the category: Brett Goldstein, who plays the prickly retired footballer Roy Kent; Brendan Hunt, the laconic assistant Coach Beard; and Jeremy Swift, the amiable team executive Higgins. It’s a not terribly predictable turn for a man who at one time was pursuing a Ph.D. in geophysics at Cambridge, with plans to work in the oil industry. But a stint in the Footlights, the university’s famous comedy troupe (celebrity alumni include John Cleese, Olivia Colman and John Oliver, among many others), set him on a different path. Mohammed has since been a fairly regular presence on British radio and TV, though he has only felt comfortable calling himself an actor “really for the last five years or so,” he said. Before “Ted Lasso,” he was probably best-known to American viewers as a creator and star of the cybersecurity sitcom “Intelligence,” streaming on Peacock. “It was a bit of a slow burn,” he said. “A bit like Nate, I guess: Just plugging away at it for a while. But I love it, and I feel very lucky and grateful to call it a living.” In a recent phone interview, Mohammed talked about Season 2 pressures, Nate’s coming “spiral” and what it’s like to play a soccer coach when you don’t care about soccer. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. “Ted Lasso” received the most ever Emmy nominations for a first-year comedy. I doubt anyone would have predicted that when it premiered in August 2020. It was quite a strange thing, really. We loved the show and obviously we all hoped that it would resonate with lots of people and so on, but you can’t really predict that kind of success. I get recognized every day, which is weird. Then with Season 2 coming off the back of the success of Season 1, there was suddenly a lot of attention on the show and a responsibility for us to deliver as well.
