Hannah Waddingham heard the Ted Lasso writers were getting back in a room together to talk about a fourth season, a season nobody thought would ever happen, and she had exactly one thing she wanted to know.
“Am I in it?”
Juno Temple, who plays Keeley Jones on the Apple TV series, went to her agents with roughly the same worry. “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
The show returns Aug. 5, three years after it signed off, and both actresses are in it. Ten episodes. The focus shifts off the AFC Richmond men’s soccer team, which carried the first three seasons, and onto the women’s side, affectionately dubbed the Lady Greyhounds.
Creator and star Jason Sudeikis is back. The actors who played the players have been replaced by actresses, a creative call the writers decided they had to make. So this isn’t a spinoff. It also isn’t a straight continuation of the original.
Brett Goldstein, writer and executive producer who also plays Roy Kent, has the cleanest way of putting 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
They shot the first episode last summer in Kansas City, home turf for Coach Lasso and for Sudeikis. Temple and Waddingham both admit they were nervous walking back in. More than three years is a long time to be 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.
The fear wasn’t rust. It was something worse. “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.”
They finished the season in England with a new cast of actresses. Waddingham and Temple, the veterans on set now, slid into unofficial mentor roles, trying to prep their co-stars for the possibility 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 part that lands funny in hindsight. She almost didn’t get cast. Apple executives, then brand new to the television business, are said to have wanted a big marketable name for the role, 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?”
She booked Rebecca Welton, the posh and steely new owner of AFC Richmond, shortly after. Per Sudeikis, the character got 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 walking 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. Her resume at that point was thin on comedy. Thin on 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 assumed it was 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 who skipped the traditional audition process.
Temple maintains to this day that she delivers comedy on Lasso without quite understanding why she or her lines are funny. Her co-stars think that’s 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.
