It turns out former U.S. President Donald Trump is the reason behind a key creative change on the Apple TV+ comedy series “Ted Lasso”.
Actor/comedian Jason Sudeikis spoke with The Guardian recently and revealed that the football coach character was initially conceptualized with a very different demeanour to what was on screen.
Instead of the incredibly affable, warm and upbeat character we get, the original Lasso came off as much more ‘belligerent’ and broadly drawn. Then Sudeikis observed Trump’s infamous announcement of his running for President in 2015 at Trump Tower, which changed his approach.
Sudeikis put the change down to “the culture we were living in” and says:
“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… 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. 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.”
Sudeikis ended up getting to visit Trump’s successor Joe Biden at the White House to discuss “the importance of mental health to promote overall wellbeing.”
The third and seemingly final season of “Ted Lasso” is still unrolling, with the finale set to air on May 31st.
