Actor/Writer Brendan Hunt Talks ‘Ted Lasso’ New Season & Future with Rich

Ted Lasso is back, and Brendan Hunt has noticed people coming out of the woodwork about it. Season four opened in Kansas City, which he admits may not have felt like fully back back. That changes tonight, when the show returns to Richmond and they're off to the races.

The reaction has been its own vindication. "When we came out, we were on a streaming service that didn't exist," said Hunt, who co-created the show, writes on it, and plays Coach Beard. The return has pulled in a fresh wave finally deciding to see what everyone was on about, then discovering nobody was yanking their chain.

How it started is stranger than its reputation suggests. NBC had just acquired English Premier League rights at a moment when American soccer fandom was, in Hunt's words, a wasteland. They went to Jason Sudeikis, who asked if he could hire anyone he wanted and brought in Hunt and Joe Kelly. All three had moved to Amsterdam to do comedy and discovered that soccer actually doesn't suck. The same call that hired Hunt also cut him from a movie. "Bad news is you got cut from We're the Millers," he remembers hearing. "Good news, there's this soccer thing."

That became a six-minute commercial, still on YouTube, about a coach who somehow runs Tottenham Hotspur. It wasn't a show yet. A second round of ads found his sensitive side, a pilot got written, and it sat collecting dirt until Bill Lawrence took a meeting. Apple was the only bidder.

Asked for the work he's proudest of, Hunt didn't hesitate. The Amsterdam episode was his to marshal, and Amsterdam is no bit for him. He spent five years at the comedy theater Boom Chicago, which he cheerfully calls too long a stay, and Apple only cleared the trip on the condition that it connect to the story. Friends who own that theater relayed a note from the city's tourism board: best advertisement for Amsterdam they'd had in media in 20 years.

His favorite thing written for himself came right after, when Beard has to explain total football to the team. Whenever Beard explains a rule to Ted, Hunt said, that's really the writers explaining soccer to the audience, and the dose has to be exact. Too much is boring, too little and a plot point dies later. Delivering it as an emotional monologue about a philosophy he genuinely loves was, for a character normally tasked with being terse, a gift.

Then there's the fantasy league, which is a menace. Hunt plays in a 10-sport keeper league entering season 20 with 15 teams, an auction, and rosters made of franchises, not players. You don't own Caleb Williams, you own the Bears. The prize is a plaid jacket he calls a mix of an early ESPN blazer and the green jacket. Hideous, handsome, still worn proudly.

Regrets have set in, though. Hunt dealt the Los Angeles Rams this offseason, after Myles Garrett arrived, for two keepers in his worst categories: Coco Gauff and Chase Elliott.

As for a fifth season, the missing beard means nothing. It grows back in a month, and it's gone because it's hot out and he loves his wife. Apple and Warner Bros. have said nothing official. Creatively, the answer is yes, with a caveat.

"We're not coming back just to squeeze one last nugget out of the tube," Hunt said. Season four is built so it could end there or keep going, and he thinks there's more to do with this half-new world. Which puts Apple, as Rich noted, on the clock.