How Much Improv is There on Ted Lasso?

But what about Ted Lasso, which is a scripted show? How often do the actors improvise on set? The answer came from none other than the leading Ted Lasso stars – Brett Goldstein (Kent Roy) and Hannah Waddingham (Rebecca).

The duo talked to Entertainment Weekly about the show, which polled 20 Emmy nominations for Season 2 alone.

"Probably less than you might imagine," Goldstein said while Waddingham supported is words saying "next to nothing."

But Goldstein went on to say that certainly what Jason, himself, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt and other writers on set did is almost like pre-improvising.

"We'll have the script and we'll talk before we shoot and then that becomes the thing that we shoot." He shared that Jason Sudeikis is often the last one to shoot because "he will do some amazing s--- that you're like once..," Goldstein joked.

Waddingham agrees with her co-star that they do a lot of pre-improv stuff, and one can feel that from the script.

"The one thing I always get involved with is anglicizing Rebecca to death. There'll be things like "I don't know, I guess," and I just say "Absolutely not." She doesn't talk like that, for God's sake. I think they've learned now to go, "Yeah, just do what you want with it," Waddingham laughed.

In one of the interviews following the release of the series' first season, Bill Lawrence, the co-creator of the show, also said all the jokes were scripted. But there was a room for improvisation.

"I love working on shows driven by comedians, where you never know what they're going to say, and you're sometimes trying to make one take when the person's off on an insane tangent, with another take where they're sticking to the script," Lawrence told at 2021 SXSW panel (via).

He said that Sudeikis really saw Ted Lasso as a meticulously scripted show, but "when you have an idea for a different line, or something has come to you, or quite honestly, the writing staff has so much fun on this show that there isn't a joke or moment that we haven't scripted two or three [alternative takes] to, Jason is super-supportive of trying them."

Sudeikis "is going to keep tinkering with the scene, and it's one of the things that makes it better and better."

Actually, improv is what made the Apple+ TV Ted Lasso series possible in first place. The character premiered in NBC Sports commercials almost a decade ago in 2013 when NBC aired Premier League soccer matches and hired Sudeikis to promote them. The comedian teamed up with Hunt and Kelly to create Ted Lasso. Sudeikis said at Startalk Radio podcast that those commercials were fully improvised.

"Even the way we went about making those commercials for NBC Sports with the Tottenham Hotspurs, etc. we didn't write a script. We just didn't have a hard copy of the script that people were going through. We just trusted each other," the comedian said back in 2021.

Ted Lasso Season 3 should have premiered in the fall of 2022, but due to production and money issues the release has been postponed.