When word got back to Hannah Waddingham that the Ted Lasso writers were gathering in a room again to hash out a fourth season — the season nobody believed would ever arrive — she had exactly one question.
“Am I in it?”
Juno Temple, who plays Keeley Jones on the Apple TV series, took roughly the same worry to her agents. “I was like, ‘Oh, do you think they want me?'” she says. She wasn’t joking.
Both of them got the same answer: yes.
What season four actually is
Three years after signing off, the show comes back Aug. 5, and both actresses are aboard. Ten episodes. The attention moves off the AFC Richmond men’s soccer team that carried the first three seasons and onto the women’s side, affectionately dubbed the Lady Greyhounds.
Creator and star Jason Sudeikis returns. Actresses have taken over from the actors who played the players, a creative call the writers decided they had to make. So this is neither a spinoff nor a straight continuation of the original.
Brett Goldstein — writer and executive producer, and Roy Kent himself — has the cleanest way of framing it: “You’re like, it’s not Frasier; Cheers still exists.” And then: “It’s more like you’re adding a room to the bar.”
The ribs solved it
The first episode was shot last summer in Kansas City, home turf for Coach Lasso and for Sudeikis alike. Temple and Waddingham each admit to nerves walking back in. Upwards of three years is a long stretch to spend away from a character.
“We were like, ‘How do we do this? How do we do this?’ And then we sat down to eat ribs and we went, ‘Oh, right,'” says Waddingham.
What scared them wasn’t rust. It was something worse than that. “We just didn’t want to do it a disservice, when it was such a beautiful thing you don’t want to turn into cartoon characters,” she says. “I’ve never done something for this long and I would never want to step into a caricature of what we’ve created in purity. So I think we were all just trying to keep it rooted, but we were also giddy as shit.”
The season wrapped in England with a new cast of actresses. Now the veterans on set, Waddingham and Temple slipped into unofficial mentor roles, trying to prepare their co-stars for the chance that this show reroutes their lives the way it rerouted theirs six years ago.
“I was teasing them, like, ‘Just wait till you see your face on a great big billboard,” says Waddingham. “Like, you fucking wait!”
Waddingham needed a letter to get the job
Here’s the bit that plays as comedy in hindsight. The part almost went elsewhere. Apple’s executives, brand new to the television business back then, are said to have wanted a big marketable name, and Waddingham’s name carried weight mainly inside the British theater community.
So she called in a favor from a former boss: Game of Thrones‘ D.B. Weiss. She asked him to write a letter on her behalf. He did, and he sent it upstairs with feeling. The subject line, as Waddingham remembers it: “Why are we even having this conversation?”
Shortly afterward she booked Rebecca Welton, the posh and steely new owner of AFC Richmond. Per Sudeikis, the character took her name from his Tumbledown costar Rebecca Hall, who he’d thought about early in development. Then Waddingham auditioned and that was that.
She still remembers stepping out of the room and mentioning to the U.S. casting director that Rebecca, unlike Waddingham, doesn’t sing. Sudeikis, within earshot: “She does now.”
Temple thought the text was a wrong number
Temple had worked with Sudeikis’ ex, Olivia Wilde, on HBO’s Vinyl, and heard about Keeley straight from him over text. Comedy was thin on her resume at that point. So was lightness, generally.
“I’d played a lot of young women who were figuring out where they are in the world and what that means,” Temple says, “and as most women can relate to, that can sometimes be really painful.”
A half-hour comedy was such a departure that she took the message for a mistake. “I genuinely thought that Jason had accidentally texted the wrong person,” she says. Her reply amounted to: “This is Juno, by the way.” She and the late Anthony Head, who played Rupert — Rebecca’s ex and the former owner of AFC Richmond — were the only two original cast members to skip the traditional audition process.
Temple still insists she delivers comedy on Lasso without quite understanding why she or her lines are funny. Her co-stars think that is precisely the mechanism.
“Some of the funniest days are when JuJu goes, ‘What does that mean and why is it funny?'” says Waddingham. “You’re like, ‘Doesn’t matter. Do it like that. It’s excellent.'”
Ted Lasso returns to Apple TV on August 5, with episodes rolling out weekly.