He and Hannah Waddingham — who plays Rebecca Welton, the scheming but sympathetic owner of AFC Richmond, the English football team Lasso coaches — talked virtually with THR ahead of the second season about exploring why good people do bad things, on-the-fly script edits and the art of not giving too much away.
HANNAH WADDINGHAM The night before, I got fractionally drunk because I was nervous.
I was just a bit like, “Get it done,” and I ripped it up as I always do with scripts.
That was surprising to me when we did finally meet.
I remember you being sort of surprised that I didn’t comment on it.
WADDINGHAM I was like, “How is this not an issue? It’s been an issue for 20 years of my career.” It was kind of chilled out and strangely pleasurable.
I remember talking to Hannah through some of the things that weren’t necessarily on the page, and I remember you being a little bit like, “Wait, what?” And feeling like, “I know this story.” I think one of the reasons people like the show is they have gone through versions of these stories.
But she was just a villain, you know? The Rebecca storyline, when the initial idea was coming up, was kind of like, “What’s the story there? Why do good people do bad things?” It was really about showing how the wrong situation can make a very loving person make the wrong choices.
I’m sure there’s a Greek myth, too, that I’m not well-versed in that’s the same idea of hiring someone to fail.
When I first read that, I was like, “Oh, that is a brilliant way of putting it.” It’s finding the way in.
Don Scardino, who directed me in several episodes of 30 Rock when I would guest-star on that, he would say, “You know, every person’s fighting their own battle.
How are you doing?” — knowing that this was going to be a longer-running thing — it allowed me to give a smile, but an acknowledgment of somebody being so direct to her.
There’s also a lot of times you’ll write the intention a little bit more bald-faced, and then get rid of it because you don’t need it.
I used to joke that with scripts, coming from an improv sketch background, 85 percent of the paper is white, meaning there’s a lot of room to improvise.
WADDINGHAM There’s one thing I’ve said to Jason since we started this, and even more so in season two: I haven’t realized how much of an effing puppeteer he is, and the writers, how much we don’t even realize.
It’s so much fun, once I stopped wanting to have control of that.
I think, again, that comes from having a background in improvisation, but then also working in a place like Saturday Night Live where you are changing things between 10:30 and 11:30 to be put on live television.
When we have people come in that are day players or coming in for two eps, and they suddenly get sidled over a little piece of paper or the back of an envelope, and you see the blind fear, I feel like going, “I know.
SUDEIKIS I try to be careful of never asking anyone to do something I wouldn’t do to myself, as a guy who has to say a butt-load of words that sort of get rewritten between takes.
Before this show aired, I don’t think anybody really knew what to expect.
A lot of the story was broken before the season had finished, where a good chunk of it was headed as far as the big plot lines and the character shifts.
Apple and Warner Brothers have been so on the whole COVID thing of keeping us all safe that it’s like tested to the nth degree and all the masks and then us women would have the visors.
SUDEIKIS The same way we as human beings change when we hit a certain moment in our life, usually something within us needs to shift.