A few years ago, Brett Goldstein thought his career was over. This was the mid-2010s, before Ted Lasso, before Shrinking, before he wound up playing a Greek god for Marvel and starring opposite Jennifer Lopez in a romcom he wrote himself. Back then, Goldstein was just a working comedian, performing to small crowds in sticky London bars and comedy clubs a few nights a week.
‘I’d get tiny acting jobs, I did stand-up comedy and I would edit other people’s scripts,’ Goldstein recalls. ‘I always earned just enough to be able to pay my rent and go to the cinema.’ Growing up in Sutton, south London, Goldstein dreamed of making films and had studied film and feminism at Warwick University with the hope of making it in Hollywood. By his thirties, he’d played parts in TV shows such as Ricky Gervais’s Derek and The Catherine Tate Show, and wrote and starred in small films, such as Superbob (an action comedy about a postman bestowed with superpowers). ‘But I wasn’t getting any bigger,’ he says. ‘No one saw any of the stuff I was making.’
Then, in 2016, he flew to Los Angeles for pilot season – the high-stakes window in which new shows are pitched and bought by US networks – and landed a part in a new HBO series. ‘I was so excited,’ he says. It was not to be: a key executive left the studio while they were filming, ‘and it was suddenly like, “the show’s never going to happen”’. Crestfallen, he returned to London, and his old routine.
The next year, a similar story. ‘I went back and did pilot season again,’ he says. This time, he secured a role in a new sitcom from Bill Lawrence, the creator of Scrubs, about life at a SpaceX-style rocket start-up. ‘It was like, “This is amazing, this is going to be huge.”’ He packed up his house in London and got ready to move to the States for production. ‘And then that show didn’t get picked up, and I was like, “Oh. Fuck.”’
By his third pilot season, Goldstein was losing faith. ‘I wasn’t even auditioning for anything I thought was good. I was being sent scripts and thinking, “I don’t even want to be in this.”’ He was staying alone in LA, feeling increasingly down. ‘It was all a bit grim. Also, I was getting older and I had this moment of genuine… I don’t know, epiphany, or something, where I was like, “Maybe I’ve missed my window. Maybe the window for me having any sort of big success has gone.”’
Goldstein recognises now that he wasn’t just down. ‘I was depressed,’ he says. He saw a therapist. Nothing seemed to help, until the therapist recommended that he start a gratitude journal. ‘Every day she made me write a list of 10 things that happened that day that I was grateful for.’ This didn’t come naturally. ‘In the beginning, when you’re so, so depressed, it’s like, “Nothing”. But you have to put 10 in. “The sun was up.” That’s one. You start so small. But by day 30 of doing that, you’ve started training your brain to look for the positive, and I could write a list of 100 things. I’m the luckiest guy in the world! Everything’s fucking amazing!’
So it was with this new mindset that he thought about the failed pilots, about missing his window and came to a realisation: ‘All I ever wanted to do was to make stuff,’ he says. ‘I’m still doing that. I’m doing it at a very low level, but I do it nearly every day. And that’s the bit I actually like. I don’t care about being famous. If my life is what I have at the moment, then I’m the luckiest guy in the world.’ He breaks off the story and smiles, ever a comedian, unable to resist a good punchline. ‘And then I think two weeks later, I got the phone call about Ted Lasso.’
Body of Work
It’s a cloud-strewn summer morning in south London, and although we are technically here to talk about Ted Lasso, it’s by sheer coincidence we are talking on a football pitch, of sorts; the owner of the Wandsworth mansion we’re using for this cover shoot has an indoor goal set up on a tiny Astroturf in the basement. Goldstein isn’t here for a kickabout, though. The space has been colonised by hair and make-up, and Goldstein, freshly moisturised, is talking over the jet-like din of a Dyson hairdryer.
This glow up marks a brief respite in this, the busiest year of his career. Now 46, Goldstein has never been more in demand: he’s in the middle of a press tour for Office Romance, the Netflix romcom he wrote and stars in alongside Lopez, and which a few days from now will hit number one on the streamer’s viewing charts. Before that, he was promoting the unlikely hit Sheep Detectives, in which he voiced two boisterous rams helping to solve a murder case. Then there’s Ted Lasso, the heartwarming football comedy, which returns for its fourth season in August; Escorted, a new show about life as a male escort; and a fourth season of Shrinking, the therapy drama on which he serves as writer, executive producer and occasional actor, alongside his idol Harrison Ford. ‘I need to work on my work-life balance,’ Goldstein says, happily. ‘Because I have none.’
This joyous second act – going from stand-up to screenwriter to Hollywood multi-hyphenate, and now leading man – does have its downsides. For one, he says, the constant travel is disrupting his fitness routine. ‘I can’t believe I ever get to a gym,’ he says.
Goldstein started working out seriously around a decade ago, to play a superhero in Superbob. ‘I just kind of stayed working out, because it really did help my head,’ he says. Although he’s been in decent shape ever since, more recent roles – not least playing Hercules in a post-credit scene for 2022’s Thor: Love And Thunder – have put more pressure on him to look good. ‘Being topless in stuff certainly makes you go, “Yeah, I really need to work out.”’ he laughs.
In Office Romance, for example, he knew he had a beach scene with Lopez, so told his then-trainer, LA-based Jeff Yahiro, that he wanted to up his game. ‘I said, “I’m playing a lawyer,” and he goes, “I don’t like it in films when lawyers are really jacked. I think you’re in good enough shape,”’ Goldstein says. ‘Then a week later he came back and went, “I’ve been thinking about this. It’s with J-Lo?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “We’ve gotta get working.”’
Yahiro’s advice was to lift heavier, and with more intensity. It worked: on camera as in real life, Goldstein’s in great shape, visibly strong and attainably (rather than cartoonishly) ripped. He is also – as one female friend of mine commented approvingly when I told her I was doing this interview – the rare leading man who still has a full chest of hair. ‘I only realised when I first went to LA what an anomaly I was,’ he says. ‘When I first went in a rooftop pool, I think someone called pest control. Also, Marvel didn’t have any issue with it,’ he says, of playing Hercules. ‘It’s probably why they cast me – the chest hair.’ Before you ask, no, he doesn’t have any news on if he’ll be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe again.
‘I have to exercise every day or I go mad’
Now that he’s living in New York, Goldstein is working with a new trainer, Victor Del Valle. ‘It’s always superset circuits, very heavy weights,’ he explains. ‘He absolutely fucking destroys me Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I spend the rest of the week trying to recover.’ Even then, he tries to exercise every day – walking or running – and also does reformer Pilates once a week.
Keeping fit plays another crucial role for Goldstein: keeping his head straight. ‘I have to exercise every day or I go mad,’ he explains. His favourite escape is swimming, though he rarely gets the chance around work. ‘I love being in water. I think I was a mermaid in a previous life,’ he says. A couple of years ago, after watching the documentary The Deepest Breath, he became mildly obsessed with freediving; after training for some time, he can now hold his breath for four minutes. ‘It’s very mindful. You have to not use any energy, and that includes thinking about shit.’ (Even so, don’t try it at home. ‘It’s dangerous,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for people dying.’)
Alongside working out, Goldstein has developed other, smaller self-care routines. Remarkably, despite his schedule, he still performs stand-up at least once a week; little guest slots here or there, a chance to try out new material or test gags for the script he’s writing. ‘If I’m doing stand-up, I will meditate before I go on stage,’ he explains. ‘I’ve learned to stay small for the day, so that I can be big when I go on stage. It’s similar to the breath thing; you conserve energy.’
After more than a decade, he says, stand-up is part exorcism, part exercise. ‘Stand-ups sometimes call it “working it out”,’ he explains. ‘It’s like going to the gym. If you don’t go, you get rusty. And sometimes I’m like, “Fucking hell, I can’t believe I’ve got a gig tonight, I’m mad.” But I always feel better afterwards and am delighted I did it.’
It has proven grounding in this new, often disorientating phase of his career. ‘The big red carpet stuff is stressful. It’s so intense and you have to really prep yourself,’ he says. ‘But sometimes you’re like, “Yeah, this is hard, but it’s not harder than a comedy club on a Friday night.”’
Man Made
This joyous second act, of course, all started with Ted Lasso. The sitcom, about an American coach hired to manage the fictional football team Richmond FC, became a lockdown hit back in 2020 – a dose of big-hearted escapism amid the anxiety and trauma of a global pandemic. Goldstein, originally hired as a writer, ended up auditioning for and playing the part of Roy Kent, an ageing, bitter midfielder with a voice like a cement mixer, whose cynicism is the perfect foil to the unfailingly sunny Ted (played by Jason Sudeikis).
As Kent, Goldstein became the show’s breakout star. Suddenly, fans were heckling him at gigs and in the street, singing the character’s crowd chant (‘he’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where…’). The show wrapped in 2023 after three seasons, with Ted moving back to the US to be with his son. But in 2024, the show’s producers floated to Goldstein the idea of returning for a fourth. ‘I was always like, “We’re not done,”’ Goldstein says. ‘Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but it just felt like it’s such a lovely world that we’ve built, it seemed crazy not to go back and do more.’
The new Ted Lasso is itself, therefore, something of a second act. Roy Kent is now managing the men’s squad and Ted is instead hired by Richmond to coach its new women’s team. While several of the original cast are returning, there’s also a new locker room of faces, with new storylines. ‘I always think it’s like Springfield, there are so many characters,’ Goldstein says. ‘It allows you to do a new thing – not lose all the things you love from the original, but you get to expand the world.’
‘I definitely grew up with the feelings of, “Men aren’t supposed to show emotions”’
One of the reasons that Lasso became a hit, I suggest, is that it provided an alternative vision of manhood in a moment when discussions around masculinity are often dominated by ‘manosphere’ influencers such as Andrew Tate. Instead of an aggressive image of male success as fast cars, domination and misogyny, here was a show that allowed men to be vulnerable without being feminine, sensitive without being soft. Roy, for example, is both a hard-tackling tough guy and a surprising font of romcom one-liners. (‘You deserve someone who makes you feel like you’ve been struck by fucking lightning,’ he growls at Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca. ‘Don’t you dare settle for fine!’) ‘I didn’t go into it going, “I’m gonna write about non-toxic masculinity,”’ says Goldstein. ‘You write the characters and then you find the themes later. You realise, “Oh, I’m writing about this.”’
Writing and acting in the show has helped Goldstein empathise with men and what makes us the way we are. ‘I definitely wasn’t raised that you shouldn’t cry in front of people, for example,’ he says. ‘That was not something my dad or my mum told me. But it is something I felt. I definitely grew up with the feelings of, “Men aren’t supposed to show emotions.” But then I got older, and my experience with women was whenever I was accidentally vulnerable it went very well. I was like, “Oh, I guess I’ve been learning the wrong lessons.”’
Something similar, he says, is also true of men’s body image. ‘My trainer in New York, he was a professional bodybuilder and there are pictures of him on the wall in amazing shape,’ he says. ‘He said, “Men love it. Women hate it.”’ He laughs. ‘There are all these things where I think most people don’t know what they’re doing, they have been behaving how they think they’re meant to behave.’
One theme that unites both Ted Lasso and Shrinking is the limits of perfection; the idea that anyone has the answers, influencers included. Ted is an inspirational coach, yet a divorcee who suffers from panic attacks; Jimmy, the protagonist of Shrinking, is a messed-up widower who treats his patients while breaching ethical boundaries. ‘The most important rule of writing that I ever learned is you have to love all of your characters. Even if you are writing about bad people – men or women – you have to know where they’re coming from,’ Goldstein says. ‘I do believe that, in 98% of cases, people don’t like doing harm – and yet people do hurt each other a lot. And I think it comes from being unconscious, from making mistakes, from ego, from all kinds of reasons. Most people are doing their best. They’re struggling, or they’re angry because they’ve not had the breaks, or whatever. There’s usually a pretty good reason for why people behave the way they do, even if they don’t know it.’
Happily Ever After
Lately, Ted Lasso’s return has Goldstein thinking about second acts – and about endings. While the show’s third season finished with several of the characters’ stories neatly tied off, the fourth confronts the often messy reality of what happens afterwards. ‘It’s the end of The Graduate,’ he says. ‘They run off into the sunset, and then the camera doesn’t cut. They’re like, “Oh. Now what?”’
Goldstein has experience of this himself. In 2021, after years of failed auditions and futile pilot seasons, he won the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor, for Ted Lasso. (He won it again in 2022.) The day after that first awards show – in which he blundered and swore through his speech, charmingly shocked to have won – he remembers driving to the beach with his co-star Hannah Waddingham. ‘We were like “We have to get our heads straight or we’ll go mad,”’ he says. ‘We watched the sunset and got grounded again.’
That’s the Hollywood ending: lifelong dream achieved, a literal sunset. But of course, life isn’t like a film or a TV show. Our victories too often come just before setbacks; the only ending any of us get will invariably involve mourners and hearses. Even after the best day of your life, you have to wake up the next morning. That feeling can derail a person if they’re not careful. ‘It doesn’t fill the hole,’ Goldstein says, of winning awards. ‘It’s a lovely thing, but it doesn’t cure you.’
It’s a few weeks after our meeting in London, Goldstein and I are talking over Zoom. He’s in New York, about to start filming on a new, unnamed project. ‘I’m so lucky, crazy lucky. I get to do the things I want to do and I’m so grateful,’ he says. ‘But – and I’m not married – I often think it’s the equivalent of people’s wedding days. People talk about the honeymoon being over, the feeling of like, “We were building towards this thing, we did the thing, now what? We just come home from work and sit on the sofa?”’ He smiles. ‘And I’m like: the sofa is the best bit.’
Goldstein brings up the story about the gratitude list again. Don’t misunderstand. The point of that story isn’t about fate, or manifestation, or any of that LA nonsense. Quite the opposite. That phone call he got about Ted Lasso? It was from Bill Lawrence, of the Spaced Out pilot. He remembered that Goldstein was a writer and loved football – would he be interested in a new show about a lovable soccer coach? You see, Goldstein thought he’d missed his window. But if he’d given up, and hadn’t done all those failed auditions, he’d never have landed the gig that would end up changing his life. If he hadn’t put in the work at therapy to build healthier habits, he wouldn’t have mentally been in a place to do it and would never have turned those experiences into Shrinking, a show about therapy and the power of second chances.
‘You can look for the good. It’s a fucking skill – or, something you have to work at’
Goldstein, ever the cinephile, often talks in film references – The Graduate, the Pixar film Soul – brings up Groundhog Day, the seminal Bill Murray comedy about a man trapped to live the same day over and over. ‘The events of the day are identical. What affects his day is how he chooses to act in it,’ he says. ‘There’s a depressing day, there’s a happy day – the day is the same. It’s up to him.’
He tells the story again, of the month he spent learning gratitude and how it saved him in his darkest moments. ‘I can’t tell you the exact day it was – day 26, let’s say. But I really was like, “Oh, I get to choose how I see the world,”’ he says. ‘It really had changed me, built new synapses, whatever it is.’ He smiles, softer this time, his gravelly voice giving way for something softer. ‘You can look for the good. It’s a fucking skill – or, something you have to work at. And I don’t always achieve it. I still have darker days. But gratitude helps.’
Photography: Ian Harrison
Styling: Eric Down
Grooming: Nadia Altinbas using Shark Beauty, 111Skin and Oribe
Stylist Assistant: Andrew Burling
This interview features in the September 2026 issue of Men’s Health – out now. Subscribe to MH by hitting this link.