Jason Sudeikis says if it weren't for Trump, Ted Lasso would be much more "belligerent"
According to Sudeikis, a certain former President's inescapable persona made him rethink Ted's character after deciding: "Boy, I don't want to add to this."
Although Ted Lasso has been highlighted for the culture of amiability it promotes, Ted wasn’t always the mild-mannered, mustachioed man viewers are familiar with. In a new interview, Jason Sudeikis shares that he originally envisioned Ted—a character he debuted back in 2013 for a series of NBC Sports promotional videos—as “belligerent,” until former President Donald Trump came along and ruined the bit.
Speaking to The Guardian’s Tim Lewis, Sudeikis shares that he opted to lean into Ted’s cuddlier qualities around the same time Trump announced his first run for president in 2015. With Trump saturating the cultural market for gaffe-prone PR-nightmare children, Sudeikis felt a duty to do something different.
“It was the culture we were living in,” Sudeikis shares. “I’m not terribly active online and it even affected me. Then you have Donald Trump coming down the escalator. I was like, ‘OK, this is silly,’ and then what he unlocked in people… I hated how people weren’t listening to one another. Things became very binary and I don’t think that’s the way the world works. And, as a new parent – we had our son Otis in 2014 – it was like, ‘Boy, I don’t want to add to this.’ Yeah, I just didn’t want to portray it.”
For Sudeikis—who would ultimately go on to bring Ted Lasso to President Joe Biden’s White House years later—half the fun of tackling Ted’s story on a larger scale was the opportunity to, as he puts it, “write the change you want to see in the world.”
“Part of the joy of getting to do this neat job I’ve got to do is the wish-fulfillment,” Sudeikis explains. “Not just getting to play the characters, but also, what do you want to put out there into the world?”
New episodes of Ted Lasso’s final season air Wednesday nights on Apple TV+.