Note: This story contains spoilers from “Ted Lasso” Season 4, Episode 1.
The first stadium in the world designed and built specifically for women’s sports lies in the heart of Kansas City.
It’s appropriate then that the CPKC Stadium, home to the Kansas City Current of the National Women’s Soccer League, would be on Jason Sudeikis’ mind when he returned to the world of “Ted Lasso.” Like that stadium, the actor and series co-creator calls the Kansas City, Missouri, area his hometown. It’s also where he left his titular mustachioed, well-mannered football coach three years ago when he came back home at the end of the Apple comedy’s initial three-season run.
“I think that’s a tremendous place,” Sudeikis told TheWrap of the CPKC. “I’m really, really proud to be from a town that did what they did and are currently doing what they’re doing.”
So in the premiere of “Ted Lasso” Season 4, when Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), Keeley (Juno Temple) and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) want to bring Ted back across the pond to coach AFC Richmond’s new women’s team, they need to make their own trip to his neck of the woods — and see the CPKC Stadium for themselves.
“You walk in there, and that wasn’t a hard beat for me to play, to just look around it in awe with hopeful enthusiasm and passion and excitement,” Temple told TheWrap. “You walk into that space and it really feels special, and I hope that more states in this country and all over the world decide to start building stadiums for women’s sports.”
Declan Lowney directed the first episode of “Ted Lasso” Season 4, appropriately titled “Home” (as Kansans often hear, there’s no place like it), while co-showrunner Joe Kelly penned the screenplay. Sudeikis compared the episode, set almost entirely in KCMO, to similar times the show has stopped to explore a city before, like a Season 3 episode set in Amsterdam or Coach Beard’s Season 2 odyssey through London.
But bringing the “Ted Lasso” gang to his home, Sudeikis said, made this reunion all the more special.
“We get to see the brass, as we like to call them — Higgins, Keeley and Rebecca — eating barbecue and walking around the Plaza. It tickles me to no end, because those are real people to me, and they’re in a real town that has all sorts of beautiful things and they get to navigate it. I love the three characters’ takes on the things they learn in their 72 hours in the city.”
Sweet heat
What was 72 hours for the characters was a three-week shoot in real life, one in which Waddingham, Swift and Temple got to see the sights, in character and out. Rebecca and Keeley get drinks from Messenger Coffee Company before checking out a local boutique. Higgins attempts a trip to the American Jazz Museum (“He didn’t get to go to the jazz museum — although I did as Jeremy Swift,” the actor noted).
So what was their favorite part of seeing the city?
“I mean, the whole thing. Getting taken there by Jason, because it’s an important place to him. It’s where he came from,” Temple said. “(To) see where some of the Ted Lasso-isms were actually birthed from was a really cool thing.”
“Everywhere is unique,” Swift added. “There’s luscious vegetation, there’s historic architecture, the history of jazz and the food and the warmth of the people, you know? It was a really enjoyable experience.”
Well, Temple didn’t appreciate the horrible sunburn she got while filming a scene at Henry Lasso’s soccer game (Grant Feely takes over the role of Ted’s son in Season 4 from Gus Turner). Nor did the gang appreciate the extreme Midwestern heat.
But Waddingham said the trio was welcomed with “Midwestern hospitality straight off the bat.” Still, she worried that having to reprise her character — three years after Rebecca Welton last made an appearance — outside of her natural habitat would take a bit of getting used to.
“It really just kickstarted us back into Season 4,” she said. “I was concerned a little bit about that kind of imposter syndrome. I just thought, Do I need to be in Rebecca’s office to feel like Rebecca again? But actually it’s being around these two that does it.”
“Yeah, it’s the context of working with each other. It still works,” Swift concurred. “You can take us to, I don’t know, a desert island maybe.”
But the team didn’t start filming on a desert island. Instead, they launched the season in a barbecue joint. From the beginning of “Ted Lasso,” Sudeikis has acknowledged his love of KC BBQ, with Ted sporting a shirt for “Joe Arthur Gatestack” (referencing the four notable local joints Joe’s, Arthur Bryant’s, Gates and Jack Stack) in several episodes, including again in the Season 4 premiere.
In the end, Coach Lasso showed his true allegiance to Gates Bar-B-Q, where the group shot their first scene of the season.
“We sat down at that table and went, Oh God, there’s absolutely no reason to be worried at all,” Waddingham said.
“You can pick any of the barbecue places, but Gates has been a family favorite for a long, long time, and they have one of the best all-time catchphrases,” Sudeikis said, referencing the restaurant’s slogan of “Hi, may I help you?” “I for years wanted to do an ‘SNL’ sketch similar to the ‘Cheeseburger, cheeseburger,’ except set in Gates because I just think the ‘Hi, may I help you?’ is iconic and as great as the food. That sauce is one of my all-time favorite condiments.”
“Listen and learn”
On top of being the home of the CPKC Stadium, Kansas City was the birthplace of the Negro National League, founded by Rube Foster in Feb. 1920. Sudeikis and the writing team knew that they could draw a parallel between these historic firsts — while also comically acknowledging their vast differences, Swift noted — by taking Higgins on a diversion to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
“The idea was just the museum, but then I was like, Well, why would he go to that?” Sudeikis said. “Then I was like, Oh, he’d go to the jazz museum, and then Oh, they’re in the same building! which I hadn’t realized up to that point.”
It’s there that Higgins learns about the likes of Satchel Paige and the league, calling the players there “immortal.” Sudeikis called the museum “a remarkable place,” one that could allow the show to mix in archival footage of Black baseball players to drive the point home.
“I didn’t realize until I did the ADR that they were using footage within that, which is unusual for the show, isn’t it?” Swift said. “It’s quite radical, and that is a great bit of storytelling, I think.”
“And education,” Temple added.
Despite not being a part of the scene, Temple was proud to open this season with an episode that included such footage, taking the time to slow down and educate both the characters and the viewers.
“I think the opening episode is really important in today’s world and being humans that are alive right now: That if you get things wrong, you get things wrong. If you ask questions and you want to learn and be educated by the people that can awaken you to the fact that you may have gotten something wrong, something might be hurtful, something might be disrespectful … I thought the first episode this season was really, really brilliant and important for that exact thought process,” Temple said. “That actually, as humans, more than ever, we need to be able to listen and learn from the people around us that are educating us about themselves and about the future always.”
These experiences will last with “the brass” after they return to Richmond throughout the remainder of the season, facing the many societal hurdles that come with building a women’s team from the ground up — with Ted, of course, there to offer a hand. But before Coach Lasso has to head back across the pond, Sudeikis was just happy to kick this reunion off by showing audiences — and his friends — his home.
“It’s like having that great friend, which Brendan (Hunt) has been many times for me, where it’s just a +1 you can bring to a party, bring to an event, and you know that people are going to walk out of there wanting his phone number, inviting him to their own things. Kansas City is like that as a location,” Sudeikis said. “I think we got to see a great view of it through the eyes of the world with the World Cup and the way the town showed up for that and the various teams, the teams they hosted. Yeah, it’s a little surreal.”
“Ted Lasso” Season 4 releases new episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV.
