{"id":618234,"date":"2026-08-03T14:06:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/618234\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T14:06:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:06:17","slug":"ted-lasso-season-4-hannah-waddingham-juno-temple-worried-about-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/618234\/","title":{"rendered":"Ted Lasso Season 4: Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple Worried About Roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Hannah Waddingham<\/a> was told the writers of Ted Lasso<\/a> were reconvening to discuss a once inconceivable fourth season<\/a>, she had only one question: \u201cAm I in it?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJuno Temple<\/a>, who plays Keeley Jones on the Apple<\/a> TV series, asked her agents something similar. \u201cI was like, \u2018Oh, do you think they want me?\u2019\u201d she says, and she was deadly serious at the time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe answer to both women was an unequivocal \u201cyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Aug. 5, three years after signing off, Ted Lasso will return with an all new season and both actresses are very much a part of it. At 10 episodes, it will turn its focus<\/a> from the AFC Richmond men\u2019s soccer team, which had been at the center of the first three seasons, to its female team, affectionately dubbed the Lady Greyhounds. Creator and star Jason Sudeikis<\/a> will be back, too, though the actors who portrayed players have been replaced by actresses, which was a necessary creative decision on the part of its writers. The new season is not a spinoff \u2014 but it isn\u2019t a traditional continuation of the mothership either.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou\u2019re like, it\u2019s not Frasier; Cheers still exists,\u201d says Brett Goldstein, writer\/executive producer who also plays Roy Kent, in THR\u2019s July 22 cover story<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s more like you\u2019re adding a room to the bar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first episode of the new season was filmed last summer in Coach Lasso\u2019s (and Sudeikis\u2019) native Kansas City, and both Temple and Waddingham were admittedly nervous to be back. It had been more than three years, after all. \u201cWe were like, \u2018How do we do this? How do we do this?\u2019 And then we sat down to eat ribs and we went, \u2018Oh, right,\u2019\u201d says Waddingham.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe just didn\u2019t want to do it a disservice, when it was such a beautiful thing \u2014 you don\u2019t want to turn into cartoon characters,\u201d she continues. \u201cI\u2019ve never done something for this long and I would never want to step into a caricature of what we\u2019ve created in purity. So I think we were all just trying to keep it rooted, but we were also giddy as shit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore long, they were back in England, filming the remainder of the season with a new cast of actresses in place. As the female veterans on set, Waddingham and Temple segued into unofficial mentoring roles, doing their best to prepare their co-stars in the event that their lives and careers are transformed by the show in the same way that Waddingham and Temple\u2019s were six years earlier. \u201cI was teasing them, like, \u2018Just wait till you see your face on a great big billboard,\u201d says Waddingham. \u201cLike, you fucking wait!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe irony is that Waddingham\u2019s casting once took convincing. At the time, executives from Apple, who were just breaking into the TV business, are said to have wanted a big, marketable name in the role \u2014 and Waddingham\u2019s carried weight only in the British theater community. So, she reached out to her former boss, Game of Thrones\u2019 D.B. Weiss, and asked that he send a letter on her behalf. He agreed, firing off an emphatic recommendation to those upstairs. The subject line, according to Waddingham: \u201cWhy are we even having this conversation?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNot long after, Waddingham booked the role of Rebecca Welton, the posh and steely new owner of AFC Richmond. According to Sudeikis, the character had been named after his Tumbledown costar Rebecca Hall, who he\u2019d considered early on in the development process; then Waddingham came through, and he knew instantly that they\u2019d found their Rebecca. In fact, she still remembers walking out of the audition noting to the U.S. casting director that the Rebecca character, unlike Waddingham herself, doesn\u2019t sing, to which she heard Sudeikis say: \u201cShe does now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for Temple, she\u2019d worked with Sudeikis\u2019 ex, Olivia Wilde<\/a>, on HBO\u2019s Vinyl, and heard directly from him via text about the Keeley role. At the time, her resume was light on comedy \u2014 frankly, it was light on lightness. \u201cI\u2019d played a lot of young women who were figuring out where they are in the world and what that means,\u201d Temple says, \u201cand as most women can relate to, that can sometimes be really painful.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThe opportunity to star in a half-hour comedy came as a legitimate shock.\u00a0\u201cI genuinely thought that Jason had accidentally texted the wrong person,\u201d she says, which is why she replied with some version of: \u201cThis is Juno, by the way.\u201d (She and the late Anthony Head, who played Rupert, Rebecca\u2019s ex and the former owner of AFC Richmond, were the only two in the original cast who didn\u2019t come through the traditional audition process.)<\/p>\n

\n\tTo this day, Temple insists that she provides comedy on Lasso without fully appreciating why she or the lines that she\u2019s uttering are even funny. Her co-stars suggest that it\u2019s often funny because she isn\u2019t trying to be funny. \u201cSome of the funniest days are when JuJu goes, \u2018What does that mean and why is it funny?\u2019\u201d says Waddingham. \u201cYou\u2019re like, \u2018Doesn\u2019t matter. Do it like that. It\u2019s excellent.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTed Lasso returns to Apple TV on August 5, and rolls out episodes weekly. Read\u00a0THR\u2018s cover story with Jason Sudeikis and the\u00a0Ted Lasso\u00a0cast<\/a>\u00a0on why they returned for season four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Hannah Waddingham was told the writers of Ted Lasso were reconvening to discuss a once inconceivable fourth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[311,18,117,64358,19,17,151181,35874,37540,133714,128],"class_list":["post-618234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-apple","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-hannah-waddingham","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jason-sudeikis","tag-juno-temple","tag-olivia-wilde","tag-ted-lasso","tag-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117031966059874971","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}