Jason Sudeikis Jokes ‘Voices in My Head’ Brought Him Back to ‘Ted Lasso’ (Exclusive)

Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt and Tanya Reynolds chatted with “Extra” about “Ted Lasso” Season 4, which sees Ted return to Richmond to take on coaching a women’s football team.

Jason talked about the decision to come back, saying of the characters, “It was either a healthy or unhealthy amount of voices in my head that continued on — that being the characters that we knew — and then, like, these invisible voices… I would say — that were eventually characters that have fruition.”

He said it was also having the “absolute pleasure of befriending numerous female athletes,” explaining, “My family and I, my sisters and I, my kids, we go to a lot of WNBA games in New York specifically, season ticket holders for the Liberty.” 

He added, “The character building of the new characters… was really, really fun to have these creative debates, conversations about who these characters would be, what do they stand for, what do they mean, especially when, you know, the show has this platform. So, you're dealing with this tremendous responsibility.”

Jason quipped, "I've noticed that women are marginalized in other areas besides sports, too."

Brendan chimed in, "When we found this out in the writers' room, it was a scandal."

Jason continued, "So then, for people to explore things they'd gone through and share their stories and the for us to be able to map those... It's a whole different world, but still we go about it doing it the Richmond way. You know, like how would these characters go about trying to address this or solve this, like, quirky or, you know, relatively heavy topic. "

Brendan shared of being in the writers' room, “We got a great bunch of folks and all the people who were there Season 1 were still with us.” He went on, “Everyone's ready to jump in, you know, and do whatever we got to do. Like everyone digs the show, digs the characters, and that made it pretty easy.” 

Tanya, who plays new co-coach Alice, shared, “It was really, like, daunting, but just so exciting to play someone who… started off quite far from me.”

She added, “There are many, many layers to that awkward onion and I love it.” 

Reynolds confessed it was hard to be very straight-faced with Jason and Brendan! 

“I had so much fun,” she said. “The scenes in the office where it's just the three of us were so fun. I mean, it was hard because Alice is very straight faced and I'm not and I had to just try not to laugh, but oh God it was exhausting.”

Jason also talked about having a ton of "Ted Lasso" ideas going all the time, which he saves in his Notes app. That means there might be more to come "as long as the new iOS doesn't delete them." He laughed, "If it deletes them, then there's nothing we can do."

Hunt quickly interjected, "Of course, that would never happen on a fine Apple product! Never, never. So trustworthy."