Actor Jeremy Swift Talks ‘Ted Lasso’ Return, ‘Downton Abbey’ & More with Rich

Jeremy Swift has seen stacks of Believe signs. He still stopped to look at the one hanging in this studio, the one signed by Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, Phil Dunster, and the head coach of the Denver Broncos, Sean Payton.

"I never get tired of it," Swift said.

Ted Lasso returns for season four on Wednesday, August 5th on Apple TV, and the man who plays Higgins came on the show to talk about why the thing works, which turned out to be a more interesting conversation than a press tour usually gets.

Swift described a screening of the first two episodes at the Academy Museum a couple of nights earlier. He is used to watching this show at home, alone or with a few people. Watching it with a thousand was different.

"After, when everybody was coming out, I felt the audience had kind of been slightly recalibrated into a better place," he said.

Rich has his own version of the same phenomenon, which he described as waking up the morning after watching an episode and wondering why the sun looks brighter. Swift had a story that beats it. His manager's son was down about work, so she told him to go watch a couple of episodes. He called her back two hours later. "That worked."

The news that season four was happening reached Swift the way news reaches a man of a certain age, which is in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. He looked at his phone in London, saw the time-zone-scrambled emails from Los Angeles, and then his reps confirmed it.

He was not shocked, though. He had held a candle for it, because the ending of season three planted a seed about Keeley Jones and her hopes for a women's team, and Swift thought the logic of that was too strong to leave alone.

That is the swing of the new season. The show is going to focus on a women's team, which Swift points out has not been done in any show or movie, and which he thinks works because the territory is unexplored dramatic ground. Men's football has been going for over a hundred years and is a hugely lucrative international industry. The women's game, however excited everyone is about it, is still challenging at club level.

"You've got women who are sort of thinking, should I go for this?" Swift said. "Women are multitasking the whole time. I've got two kids, I have to look after my mom. That is very interesting to focus on. Just how women decide to come into the game and whether they choose to go ahead with it."

He is enthusiastic about the new cast in a way that does not sound like contract obligation. Really funny, really individual, brilliant casting, and fresh.

Swift's favorite episode of the run so far is episode three of season three, when Zava arrives and the team treats him like the Messiah. He praised the actor who played Zava as staggeringly good, and loved the comedy of an alpha-male athlete who is also into meditation and quietly passive-aggressive.

He confirmed something about Sudeikis, too, that explains a lot about the show. At the end of season one, Sudeikis had to deliver a rousing speech, and he did it about five times, changing it every take.

"Because he's a writer and he's such a stunning improviser, he changed it up each time," Swift said. "I was just witnessing it, but I was like, this content is changing every time. And it's all fresh and it's all so good."

He offered one piece of homework for season four viewers, too. Nick Mohammed sets everyone off and never gets caught laughing himself, so Swift tilts his head until the frame of his glasses blocks Mohammed's face. If you catch him doing it on camera, Rich noted, that is a man losing the fight in real time.

"I am. Correct."

The conversation also went to Downton Abbey, which Swift says probably got him the Ted Lasso job. It came to him slowly. A director he had worked with about six times, David Evans, called about a part that was just a couple of scenes in one episode. Swift was lukewarm until Evans mentioned it was with Maggie Smith. Then Spratt kept showing up in scripts, and it accumulated.

He had met Smith before, on Gosford Park, Robert Altman's film that Swift calls the blueprint for Downton Abbey. So he knew the trick. "Don't fall for the caustic remarks. Just make a joke out of them, and then she'll find it funny." On one of his first days on set she asked him to play Bananagrams. That was that.

What Swift admired most was her character's function. When everyone was fussing over something trivial, she delivered the reality check. And then, maybe once a season, she would play an emotional card.

"That was just like, oh man. It just counted for so much more when she did that."

Swift also has The Librarians: The Next Chapter, whose second season premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern on TNT. He described it as roughly Harry Potter meets Doctor Who, and he plays a genie granted a wish to leave his lamp and cause chaos.

But it was the Believe sign that got the last real word. Rich's favorite scene is the one where the sign rips and falls and the squad thinks that is the end of everything, until Ted tells them it is just a sign, not an omen.

Swift's favorite piece of that moment is smaller and better. Kola Bokinni walked over to the sign, put his hand on it, and looked at everybody.

"That got me. I was like, oh man, rip my heart out."