How Donald Trump inspired Jason Sudeikis to reimagine Ted Lasso
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Jason Sudeikis recently claimed that ex-president Donald Trump was behind his Ted Lasso character in the comedy-drama television series ‘Ted Lasso’. The 47-year-old actor reportedly shared that he initially made the character “belligerent” but later he decided it to be “warm and fuzzy” following Trump’s infamous 2015 Golden Escalator ride.
Sudeikis told The Guardian, “It was the culture we were living in. I’m not terribly active online and it even affected me. Then you have Donald Trump coming down the escalator. I was like, ‘OK, this is silly,’ and then what he unlocked in people…”
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‘I just didn’t want to portray it’
He continued, “I hated how people weren’t listening to one another. Things became very binary and I don’t think that’s the way the world works,” before stating, “And, as a new parent – we had our son Otis in 2014 – it was like, ‘Boy, I don’t want to add to this.’ Yeah, I just didn’t want to portray it.”
The three-time Emmy winner star, who is playing the role of a coach of a fictional English Premier League football team, AFC Richmond, also told the publication, “Richmond is, metaphorically, like a form of utopia. And yet it has to honor the fact that not everywhere else outside that utopia is utopian. And so, how would you deal with these conflicts?”
“From back in 2015, when we were first thinking: ‘What is this thing?’ I just knew inside that this guy was real. He’s complicated. He’s not perfect. He’s going through stuff. But this is who he is. He actually is nice,” Sudeikis added.
‘It’s like meeting your good friend’s father’
The ‘Horrible Bosses’ actor also spoke about his visit to the White House in March along with other cast members of ‘Ted Lasso’. He said, “I’d been in a fake Oval Office a number of times and so there’s a little bit of me that’s nonplussed by it and just holding my shit together,” referring to his sketch comedies where he impersonated George W Bush and Joe Biden several times.
Sudeikis went on to mention, “And I’d met the president when he was vice president and he’s a very warm guy. It’s like meeting your good friend’s father or your young friend’s grandfather. He just makes you feel at home and that home just happened to be the White House for that afternoon.”
‘This is the end of this story’
This comes as Sudeikis hinted at possible spinoffs of his Emmy-winning comedy. He told Deadline, “I mean, there’s always Cameo, right? This is the end of this story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell, that we loved to tell. The fact that folks will want more and are curious beyond more than what they don’t even know yet—that being Season 3—it’s flattering.”
The ‘Hall Pass’ actor added at the time, “Maybe by May 31, once all 12 episodes of the season [have been released], they’re like, ‘Man, you know what, we get it, we’re fine. We don’t need anymore, we got it.’ But until that time comes, I will appreciate the curiosity beyond what we’ve come up with so far.”