Vlad Bunoan

Article (news)

Yong Chavez

ABS-CBN News North America

<div><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oPiPzknrPwE?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe> </div>The world of “Ted Lasso” has always operated on a generous premise: People can change. They can surprise themselves. A little faith, properly applied, might get a person through a number of bad days.Season 4 gives that faith a more layered take. With Keeley Jones helping bring a new women’s team into existence, the show has a fresh arena for one of its oldest questions: What happens when optimism encounters the machinery of real life? Juno Temple, Hannah Waddingham, and the newer members of the cast find their characters confronting versions of that question in ways that feel relatable.For Temple, Keeley’s great gift is also her great vulnerability. She believes intensely in what could exist, and she wants the women’s team to become extraordinary immediately. “Dreaming big is an important thing to do,” Temple said. “But a doer will make it and explain why you may have to be patient with certain aspects, but also move forward.”Keeley’s growth this season comes through that tension. She has the enthusiasm to envision the finished product before there is even enough scaffolding to hold it up. Temple sees the people around Keeley as part of the mechanism that allows her optimism to survive contact with reality. “She is going to learn that that isn’t going to be achievable immediately, but she is going to be able to make baby steps, too,” she said. “And she’s got people around her that really believe in her, but just may have to help her navigate reining some of the excitement in.”Hannah Waddingham, sitting alongside Temple in our virtual interview, summed up the relationship by channeling Rebecca’s characteristic economy. “She’s a positive dreamer always, but they are each other’s yin and yang for sure.”<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1786695056755Ted_Lasso_Photo_040107.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>A scene from ‘Ted Lasso.’ Apple TV</div>The phrase could describe much of “Ted Lasso,” where people tend to discover themselves through relationships that expose the places where their instincts fall short. Rebecca Welton has spent three seasons becoming someone different from the woman who first arrived at AFC Richmond. Waddingham has traveled alongside her for all that time.Asked whether Rebecca had inspired her in real life, Waddingham gave an answer that went somewhere more interesting. She explained that she had arrived at the role with more self-awareness than Rebecca. Her own experiences often informed how she approached the role. “She and I have walked together through changes in both our lives,” she said.What Rebecca gave Waddingham in return was a place to process some of that change. “She has given me a great cathartic avenue for myself and a bravery, to be honest,” she said. “It was a great privilege to work through things that were going on in my own life through her lens.”That sense of mutual influence becomes especially striking when the conversation turns to women and the expectations placed upon them. Temple described one of the pressures she has encountered as an artist: the persistent feeling that she is supposed to embody a particular version of beauty, one that comes with an impossible standard of perfection.“There’s definitely an element of feeling the need to be a certain type of beauty, of being something that sometimes I feel complicated, that I can’t necessarily achieve a level of perfection that I sometimes get overwhelmed with,” Temple said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever do that.”She also spoke about the expectation that women should manage their emotions in ways that people rarely demand of men. “There&#x27;s the sort of belief that your emotions as a woman are always going to be something that can be reined in, but they can’t be,” she said.Waddingham picked up the thought and widened it beyond the particular experiences of women. “We’re all just humans,” she said. “A man can be bold, a man can be front-footed, but put that through people’s perception of a woman. If a woman does exactly the same thing, uses exactly the same vocabulary, we are seen differently. And that is tiresome, man.”The new women’s team gives “Ted Lasso” a particularly useful place to explore that frustration because the show has never treated personal growth as a straight line. Its newest players arrive carrying their own ideas about who they are supposed to be, along with fears that can get in the way.<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1786695088576Ted_Lasso_Photo_040202.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>A scene from ‘Ted Lasso.’ Apple TV</div>Jude Mack, who plays Boots, sees her character’s central struggle as one of self-belief. “For Boots, the thing that I think people might connect to, it’s the fact that she is maybe holding herself back from her own greatness,” Mack said. “That there is some fear there, and that Ted and Beard can spot that.”Mack has also spent a remarkable amount of time proving that the physical demands of football is rather less forgiving than television makes it look. Mack catches the ball barehanded for many of Boots’ scenes, with one important exception. “Not when they’re kicking it super-hard,” she said. “I’m sort of like out the way for a bit of that, but lots of it, I am catching that ball and kicking it away from myself.”The weather offered its own subplot. Faye Marsay, who plays Lizzie, pointed out that Mack was doing this in temperatures hovering around freezing. Abbie Hern, who plays Gemma, had assumed that Boots’ goalkeeper position might come with the obvious advantage of gloves.“They were like, actually, no, not you,” Hern recalled, laughing.Marsay joined in in affectionately roasting Mack. “Just in shorts and bare hands.”Marsay’s own character has a different kind of adjustment ahead. Lizzie is learning what it means to exist as a person beyond motherhood.<div>“I think with my character, it’s her becoming a person that isn’t just mother,” Marsay said. “That she becomes accepted into a group of people that she perhaps didn’t think was open to her anymore, and trying to accept that she’s welcome in a group and she’s not just mum.” <img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1786695110815Ted_Lasso_Photo_040302.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>A scene from ‘Ted Lasso.’ Apple TV</div>Hern described Gemma as someone facing consequential decisions while surrounded by people who genuinely care about her. That environment matters. For characters on “Ted Lasso,” support can become a form of courage, especially when someone is trying to make a choice before they feel completely ready.The actors have also confronted the larger realities of women’s football. They grew up in the UK, where football was part of their upbringing. Playing the sport for the show gave that familiarity another dimension.“It made me feel more kind of in line and in love with it,” Marsay said. “And it was nice to do it with these lot to have that experience as an actor doing it.”Hern came away with a different revelation. She already understood there was a disparity between men’s and women’s sports. The scale of it still surprised her.“I knew there was a disparity, but I’m still shocked daily by how much,” she said. “The disparity is vast.”That observation sits comfortably inside the larger story the season is telling. The women on-screen are trying to make space for themselves while the women behind the characters are talking about the expectations that come with taking up space. Their characters are learning to trust their instincts.Then there’s Coach Alice Chilton, played by Tanya Reynolds.“Alice is trying so hard to be perfect, and a lot of the time that means she’s sort of standing in her own way,” Reynolds said. “Where you just try so hard that you’re kind of defeating the purpose, and you’re closed. You don’t even realize it, but you’re kind of closing off.”Reynolds laughed when she acknowledged that Alice’s lesson may have some relevance outside the AFC Richmond universe. “She just needs to learn to just loosen up and open up a bit,” she said. “And I think that that’s also something that I should probably try to do at some point in my life.”<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1786695130421Ted_Lasso_Photo_040201.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>A scene from ‘Ted Lasso.’ Apple TV</div>The supporting cast of “Ted Lasso” has always benefited from characters with histories the audience wants to understand. Season 4 gives that quality even more room to breathe.They seem to have developed their own affection for the show’s peculiar ecosystem, including its capacity to turn absurdity into a survival strategy. Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard, offered a wonderfully chaotic explanation for one of the season’s stranger developments involving Beard’s now-ex-wife Jane and her autobiographical stage play. His reasoning began with the long tradition of sitcoms that sometimes paint themselves into increasingly smaller corners after the show becomes successful.The Beard-Jane storyline, Hunt explained, presented a practical question: how to avoid turning Beard into a parent while still honoring the character and his relationship. The answer involved art. Specifically, a solo fringe show.“Once we’re on that, like we’ve all seen solo fringe shows that we did not like, but that everyone around us seemed to, and that is a certain very specific corner of hell,” Hunt said, laughing. “So we got to paint that little part of hell.”The conversation somehow led to the second season of “Friday Night Lights,” which Hunt jokingly invoked as a warning about the dangers of certain television storylines where there’s a character who suddenly acts out of character. When I immediately recognized the reference, Hunt then leaned toward Reynolds, who isn’t familiar with the show, and offered a fake whisper: “There’s a murder. Like it’s crazy.”<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1786695155894Ted_Lasso_Photo_040111.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>A scene from ‘Ted Lasso.’ Apple TV</div>It was an especially “Ted Lasso” moment, the sort that makes the cast sound like a group of people who have spent years together and have developed an internal language for the show’s peculiarities. Hern has one particularly dangerous habit: She finds herself saying Coach Beard’s famous “Bebe!” even though she now plays a member of the cast.“I have to stop doing that now that I’m in the show because people are gonna be like: Yeah, aren’t you in that?” she said.That affection for the series extends to the way its characters are allowed to have weaknesses without being reduced to them. Marsay remembered watching the show during the pandemic and especially appreciated its ability to turn vulnerability into a source of possibility.“I like how Jason shines light on people’s weaknesses, but doesn’t make it a kind of tragic thing,” she said. “He makes it an opportunity for that person to overcome it.”Even Roy Kent’s profanity gets a shout-out. Mack singled out the simplicity of Roy’s frequent expletive as part of the show’s enduring appeal, describing its role in puncturing the series’ American optimism.The new season seems interested in the stretch between believing you can do something and actually doing it. That space can be awkward, funny and, because this is “Ted Lasso,” also genuinely emotional.

The world of “Ted Lasso” has always operated on a generous premise: People can change. They can surprise themselves. A little faith, properly applied, might get a person through a number of bad days.

The world of “Ted Lasso” has always operated on a generous premise: People can change. They can surprise themselves. A little faith, properly applied, might get a person through a number of bad days.

Here in Hollywood: ‘Ted Lasso’ cast members reveal Season 4’s games

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Here in Hollywood: ‘Ted Lasso’ cast members reveal Season 4’s games

Yong Chavez,

ABS-CBN News North America

Published August 14, 2026 05:27 PM PHT

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Yong Chavez

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