Actor Jeremy Swift on the Much-Anticipated ‘Ted Lasso’ Return

Jeremy Swift learned that Ted Lasso was coming back the way a lot of people over a certain age learn anything: on a phone screen, in the middle of the night, on the way to the bathroom.

"As a man of a certain age, I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night in London and looked at my phone," Swift told Rich. The time difference means the emails from Los Angeles land while he is asleep. This one made him stop. Then his reps in the States confirmed it. It's back.

He was not entirely surprised, because he never really let go of the idea.

"I always held a candle for it," Swift said, "because logic kind of insisted that having had the seed planted at the end of season 3 about Keeley Jones' hopes for a women's team, that just seemed like it had to happen."

That is the swing of this fourth season, and Swift knows exactly how unusual it is.

"It hasn't been done in any show or movie," he said. "So that's the radical thing that's going to happen in this new season, that it's going to focus on a women's team."

Rich pointed out that the show's creator did not arrive at this idea by accident. Jason Sudeikis is a genuine fan of women's sports, a New York Liberty season ticket holder when he is in town. Swift has seen it up close. The two of them went to a Kansas City Current game in June around Sudeikis's Big Slick charity event.

"He's all about it," Swift agreed.

Then Rich confessed the thing that a lot of viewers will recognize. He and his wife watch Ted Lasso before bed, and the next morning the world seems slightly recalibrated. "Why am I seeing the sun brighter today?"

Swift has heard versions of that story for years. His manager told him about her son, who was in a rough patch at work. Her advice was to go watch a couple of episodes. He called back about two hours later.

"That worked," the son told her. "I'm just feeling a better place."

The strange part, Swift said, is that the reaction was there almost immediately. Apple dropped three episodes at once in season 1, back when he was still on Twitter, and the positivity was so uniform he assumed it was manufactured.

"I thought, this is Apple wielding some power and these are bots or whatever," he said. "And I just thought, wait, there's somebody going to go, 'This show sucks' or whatever. But there wasn't. Everybody just took to it so quickly."

Season 1 landed in the middle of COVID. By the time they made season 2 and came out to Los Angeles for a screening of the first two episodes, Swift went to the red carpet mostly to get it over with. He got out of the car and found a grandstand holding roughly 500 people, all of them losing it.

"That was a switch in my head that went, never happened before."

Rich asked whether Downton Abbey had ever produced that. Not quite, Swift said, though he pushed back gently on the idea that fans of the older show do not dress the part. He remembered an appearance by Jim Carter, who played the butler, at a theater in Los Angeles.

The entire audience showed up in Edwardian garb.