Jason Sudeikis is back on television with his new AppleTV+ series, and he can thank Olivia Wilde for that! Nischelle Turner spoke with the 44-year-old actor about his latest project, Ted Lasso, and how his partner of almost 10 years nudged him to make the show.
“I think it’s worthwhile for any guy to listen to their partner, but certainly when they know their stuff. Olivia knows her stuff,” Sudeikis tells 360aproko. “We did the commercial in 2013… She was like, ‘You should turn this into a show.’ She said that over dinner that she mentioned that. I just started riffing ideas where I was like, ‘Oh, it needed this. It needed that.'”
Sudeikis stars as the eponymous Ted Lasso, who is described as “an idealistic all-American football coach hired to manage an English football club — despite having no soccer coaching experience at all.” The show is based on a character the actor played in a series of NBC Sports comedy shorts in 2013, which were made to promote the fact that NBC Sports would be airing English Premier League soccer matches.
After Wilde’s suggestion, he sat down with Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, whom he worked with on the commercials and are now writers and producers on the show. “Brendan is one of the actors and we sat down and just tried to put fingers to keys and prove to ourselves maybe it had the ability to be something more than these four-minute little skits online,” Sudeikis explains. “And two years after that, Bill Lawrence entered our universe, and two years after that, here I am two weeks before it’s about to be [out] world wide.”
Wilde, meanwhile, became a sought-after director after her feature film directorial debut with Booksmart. When asked if he’d have the mother of their two children — son Otis, 6, and daughter Daisy, 3 — helm an episode of Ted Lasso, Sudeikis was all for it.
“She’s got so many things lined up and I’ve never seen anyone work so hard,” he fawns over Wilde. “Basically while I’ve been editing a show on a deadline and going right into writing a potential second season, she’s been prepping four different films and teaching kindergarten to Otis and just trying to wrangle in Daisy, who’s in her peak ‘three-nager’ years right now. Yeah, we’d be lucky to get her, but I don’t know if there’s enough days in the calendar for us to pull it off.”
The power couple have certainly been busy raising their son and daughter, but luckily have some help at home.
“Disney+ has [Otis] wrapped around his finger. They are digging Hamilton. That is their big thing,” Sudeikis says of their 6-year-old son. “He’s like a sponge. He memorized the lyrics to ‘Aaron Burr’ in three listens.”
As far as Sudeikis’ other projects, could fans see him reprise his role as former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in upcoming Saturday Night Live episodes?
“That’s up to Lorne Michaels and the good people of the government if we’re allowed to move around,” he replies. “We’ll see how that all shakes out. But yeah, I understand the responsibility of hopping in those giant fake teeth I wear when I play him, and much like the Batman howl, I try to be responsible with that power.”
