Before he became an Emmy-winning star playing the foul-mouthed soccer icon Roy Kent in “Ted Lasso,” Brett Goldstein had been a stand-up comedian for almost two decades. But if you’re looking for visual evidence, it might be hard to come by, because videos of his early days on stage are almost nonexistent.
“I’ve done 17 years of stand-up, but there’s no proof,” he said with a laugh. “I could be lying.”
That’s because Goldstein was not a fan of filmed stand-up — until this year, when his “Brett Goldstein: The Second Best Night of Your Life” came to HBO. “I’ve always resisted filming, and I never put stuff I did online,” he said. “It’s about the live experience, and I feel that quite strongly.”
“There’s a pact you make with the audience, which I love. The exchange happens in a room with an audience, and when you take that out of context and stick it on the internet for people to weigh in on, I sort of think, ‘Yeah, but this wasn’t for you. It was for the room where we did it,’” he added.
But on the heels of his success with “Ted Lasso” (where he was hired as a writer and also ended up playing Kent) and “Shrinking” (where he’s a co-creator and acted in Season 2), Goldstein decided to take an offer to do an HBO special of the stand-up act with which he had been touring. “And then it became this challenge of: How do you make it work on screen?” he said.
“I know it worked in the room, but how do you edit stand-up?” he said of the experience reworking the act for the small screen. “How do you frame it? Where do you cut into a joke? Thank God I worked with brilliant people who knew what they were doing, because I was constantly like, ‘How do we make sure this is funny on screen?’”
The special comes from the first extensive tour he did in the wake of his success of “Ted Lasso,” for which he won two Emmys and became a household name. As for whether the audiences reacted differently to him once they knew him as Roy Kent, he can only speculate.
“I don’t know what people were expecting when they came to see me,” he said. “It amazed me that they bought tickets, not knowing me as a stand-up. I think it probably worked in my favor, because their expectations must have been very low.”
He laughed. “Maybe they thought I was gonna come out and kick a ball and say ‘f— off” and leave, and that would be enough. But instead I came out and did stand-up as myself. In a way, it’s helpful, because I’ve promised them nothing and their expectations are low. So when I’m a competent stand-up, I seem like I’m really good.”
For the special, he shortened the set from 90 minutes to 60 minutes because “an hour sounds bearable at home,” and he cut out some of the digressions that were among his favorite things in the show. The special landed on HBO around the same time that it was announced that “Ted Lasso” would be returning for a new season two years after going off the air in 2023, and shortly after “Shrinking” dropped a second season in which Goldstein played the drunk driver who killed the wife of the character played by Jason Segel.
But that kind of schedule is typical for Goldstein, who has been tackling a variety of jobs for his entire career. “I was always all three: writer, actor, stand-up,” the London native said. “I was paid to do stand-up. I would do club gigs four nights a week on average, but in the days I’d be writing and acting. That was enough to pay my bills and buy a cinema ticket once a week. It was always just enough.”
These days, he’s finishing Season 3 of “Shrinking” and he’s back in the writers’ room on “Ted Lasso,” which will shoot during the second half of the year. He’s also prepping for the 2025 release of “All of You,” a romantic comedy that he co-wrote with William Bridges about a slightly futuristic society in which a test can positively identify each person’s soulmate. (The test does not identify the characters played by the stars of the film, Goldstein and Imogen Poots, as soulmates, but of course the audience knows better.)
“I like to be busy and I’m very lucky to do all the things that I’m doing, but it is sort of insane,” he said of his schedule — not that he wants to change it. “As long as I’m allowed to, I would love to act, write and do stand-up. I would never want to stop any of them.”
“And I also think they all lead into each other. Stand-up’s really good for your brain: The adrenaline when you’re on stage makes your brain work so fast, and I think that keeps me sharp when I’m in the writers’ room. And then you can take all of that and put it into acting. They all feed each other. It’s a very lucky system.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Comedy Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
