The title ‘America’s older brother’ could be attributed to Jason Sudeikis. In many of his famous roles, from affable dudes on Saturday Night Live to self-assured protagonists in We’re the Millers and Horrible Bosses, he exuded a fraternal, (or even fraternity brother) vibe. Isn’t it?
Additionally, in later years, Ted Lasso, an Apple TV+ show, featured the titular American football coach as the defiantly kind and diligent leader of an English professional soccer team.
Throughout his career, Sudeikis has starred in films that have brought in big bucks, promoted Saturday Night Live, and garnered a lot of praise for the utterly adored Ted Lasso. It’s difficult to distinguish between the actor and his character. Because he blends into roles with such a laid-back on-screen presence that it’s difficult to tell where one character ends and the other begins.
Here’s a look at the 47-year-old American actor, comedian, writer, and producer’s rarely-discussed career ascent, and untold facts, mostly concerned with Ted Lasso.
How Did Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso Begin?
Advertising is common and pervasive, but it rarely contaminates other facets of culture. But that’s exactly what happened with Ted Lasso, the popular, Emmy-winning Apple TV+ soccer comedy, starring Jason Sudeikis.
According to a Yahoo! Movies interview from 2013, NBC Sports hired Sudeikis to create a series of entertaining ads to promote broadcasts of English Premier League soccer matches. The Hall Pass actor confirmed this to Entertainment Weekly:
“They had like four or five ideas and one of them was an American coach coaching soccer in London, and they had modeled the idea off of a version of a coach character I had played a few times on ‘SNL.'”
However, that coach was harsh and nasty, so Sudeikis changed it into “what ended up becoming Ted Lasso” because he no longer wanted to play him that way.
So how did an advertising mascot turn into a comedy on streaming?
Olivia Wilde “had the initial idea for this as a TV show,” the actor, 47, said when Ted Lasso won the 2021 Critics Choice Award for Best Comedy Series, according to ET.
“She was like, ‘You guys are doing that so much, you should do it as a movie or a TV show.'”
In 2015, the Race actor worked with Scrubs creator, Bill Lawrence to write a full-length pilot script alongside Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt.
But Is Jason Sudeikis Actually Like ‘Ted Lasso’?
Jason Sudeikis concentrated solely on his burgeoning acting career after leaving Saturday Night Live in 2013, appearing in blockbuster comedies like We’re the Millers and Horrible Bosses 2.
The best reviews of his career have come from his portrayal of Ted Lasso, an earnest, compassionate, and heartbroken American football coach. Of course, he later became the coach of the English soccer team on the Apple TV+ comedy, Ted Lasso.
Sudeikis, like many actors, tends to get typecast as his character, that was a smug, smarmy, self-satisfied guy. And for him, who co-created the series, coordinating that shift was always a part of the plan.
As a “little bit of a challenge to myself,” the 47-year-old actor told Collider, “I just felt like it’d be nice to play someone” other than his typical characters.
“Someone who doesn’t swear. A show that doesn’t use snark as a currency. It was an expertise in trying to prove to myself that it’s possible to be a good person and still be interesting.”
Sudeikis worked hard, but in a good way, to give the character a convincing and compelling portrayal. He claimed in Entertainment Weekly,
“[Ted] really is the best version of myself” and “does see the best in people. He’s like me after two beers on an empty stomach on a bright sunny day, just like, ‘With all of us together, what can’t we do?'”
It is safe to say that Ted Lasso’s idealized portrayal of a soft masculine ideal has been enhanced by the Sudeikis narrative, giving the show wings to soar.
All three seasons of Ted Lasso are streaming on Apple TV+.
Source- Entertainment Weekly
