How Jason Sudeikis Needed to Make Season 4 of Ted Lasso To Save Himself.
By Lucy Broadbent
Ted Lasso star and creator, Jason Sudeikis admits that his Apple TV+ show saved him, and he “needed” the forthcoming season four as much as his fans.
“It’s infectious to play a character who sees the best in people and isn’t mad at the world for all its foibles and bullies and shadows,” says Sudeikis. “It’s not like I’m Daniel Day-Lewis, but it was good to live in that – to have that coursing through your brain and your body all day. It still is.”
Ted Lasso was meant to be finished back in 2023. It’s three season arc was done. After five years of creating and starring in the award-winning show for the best part of five years, Jason Sudeikis was exhausted. During those years, Sudeikis had gone through an unhappy divorce and even though he was offered more money to make further seasons of the show, he said he was finished with Ted. “The story was told. Ted went home to be with his son,” Sudeikis explains. “I, one hundred percent thought it was done.”
But then Sudeikis got some rest. Time passed. “I was like,’Oh, I don’t know if it’s done’,” he says.
Co-star Hannah Waddingham tells Sudeikis she always knew Ted Lasso would be back, even if Sudeikis didn’t know it himself.
The pair appear in a glitzy video together, alongside fellow co-star Juno Temple, created by The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t think there was any chance we weren’t coming back because you are such a champion of the women’s game and women’s sport,” she tells him. “I thought it was only a matter of time before Apple shut you in a hermetically sealed chamber and went ‘Boy, write the women’s story.”
Sudeikis says that did not happen. But the focus of the new season is about Ted coaching a women’s soccer team, described by Apple as his “biggest challenge yet.” New stars include Tanya Reynolds, Tracey Ullman, but, as is always the Ted Lasso way, many new faces, among them Jude Mack, Faye Marsay, Rex Hayes, Aisling Sharkey, Abbie Hern and Grant Feely. Veteran star Waddingham warns the new cast: “Enjoy your anonymity now. Just wait till you see your face on a great big billboard.”
Sudeikis would like this next season to be part of another three-season arc, and all being well, hopes that the writers will be moving on to seasons five and six next year. “I know I needed this,” he says. “I needed it as much as other people do.”
Ted Lasso Season 4 will be out on Apple TV on August 5
