When Hannah Waddingham was told the writers of Ted Lasso were reconvening to discuss a once inconceivable fourth season, she had only one question: “Am I in it?”
Juno Temple, who plays Keeley Jones on the Apple TV series, asked her agents something similar. “I was like, ‘Oh, do you think they want me?’” she says, and she was deadly serious at the time.
The answer to both women was an unequivocal “yes.”
On Aug. 5, three years after signing off, Ted Lasso will return with an all new season and both actresses are very much a part of it. At 10 episodes, it will turn its focus from the AFC Richmond men’s soccer team, which had been at the center of the first three seasons, to its female team, affectionately dubbed the Lady Greyhounds. Creator and star Jason Sudeikis will be back, too, though the actors who portrayed players have been replaced by actresses, which was a necessary creative decision on the part of its writers. The new season is not a spinoff — but it isn’t a traditional continuation of the mothership either.
“You’re like, it’s not Frasier; Cheers still exists,” says Brett Goldstein, writer/executive producer who also plays Roy Kent, in THR’s July 22 cover story. “It’s more like you’re adding a room to the bar.”
The first episode of the new season was filmed last summer in Coach Lasso’s (and Sudeikis’) native Kansas City, and both Temple and Waddingham were admittedly nervous to be back. It had been more than three years, after all. “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.
“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 continues. “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.”
Before long, they were back in England, filming the remainder of the season with a new cast of actresses in place. As the female veterans on set, Waddingham and Temple segued into unofficial mentoring roles, doing their best to prepare their co-stars in the event that their lives and careers are transformed by the show in the same way that Waddingham and Temple’s were six years earlier. “I was teasing them, like, ‘Just wait till you see your face on a great big billboard,” says Waddingham. “Like, you fucking wait!”
The irony is that Waddingham’s casting once took convincing. At the time, executives from Apple, who were just breaking into the TV business, are said to have wanted a big, marketable name in the role — and Waddingham’s carried weight only in the British theater community. So, she reached out to her former boss, Game of Thrones’ D.B. Weiss, and asked that he send a letter on her behalf. He agreed, firing off an emphatic recommendation to those upstairs. The subject line, according to Waddingham: “Why are we even having this conversation?”
Not long after, Waddingham booked the role of Rebecca Welton, the posh and steely new owner of AFC Richmond. According to Sudeikis, the character had been named after his Tumbledown costar Rebecca Hall, who he’d considered early on in the development process; then Waddingham came through, and he knew instantly that they’d found their Rebecca. In fact, she still remembers walking out of the audition noting to the U.S. casting director that the Rebecca character, unlike Waddingham herself, doesn’t sing, to which she heard Sudeikis say: “She does now.”
As for Temple, she’d worked with Sudeikis’ ex, Olivia Wilde, on HBO’s Vinyl, and heard directly from him via text about the Keeley role. At the time, her resume was light on comedy — frankly, it was light on lightness. “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.”
The opportunity to star in a half-hour comedy came as a legitimate shock. “I genuinely thought that Jason had accidentally texted the wrong person,” she says, which is why she replied with some version of: “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 in the original cast who didn’t come through the traditional audition process.)
To this day, Temple insists that she provides comedy on Lasso without fully appreciating why she or the lines that she’s uttering are even funny. Her co-stars suggest that it’s often funny because she isn’t trying to be funny. “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, and rolls out episodes weekly. Read THR‘s cover story with Jason Sudeikis and the Ted Lasso cast on why they returned for season four.
