Jason Sudeikis Says He Switched From Ted Lasso to Donald Trump

(CNN) — “Ted Lasso” is a more likeable character thanks to Donald Trump.

That’s according to star and creator Jason Sudeikis, who plays the lovable goofball coach on the Apple TV+ series.

In an interview with The Guardian’s The Observer, Sudeikis said he was having dinner with his then-partner Olivia Wilde in 2015 when he “wondered if he could go back to a character called Ted Lasso that he had created for a sketch of comedy two years before”.

Lasso, according to Sudekis, was originally “belligerent”. The rising political tensions of the time inspired him to develop the character in a new direction.

Jason Sudeikis in “Ted Lasso,” now streaming on Apple TV+. Credit: Colin Hutton/Apple TV+

“It was the culture we lived in,” Sudeikis said. “I’m not terribly active on the internet and it even affected me. Then you have Donald Trump going down the escalator. I was like, ‘Okay, this is bullshit,’ and then what it triggered in people… I hated that the people didn’t listen to each other. Things got very binary and I don’t think the world works that way. And as a first-time dad, we had our son Otis, in 2014, it was like, ‘Whew, I don’t want to add anything to this.’ Yeah, I just didn’t want to portray him.”

As a result, the character became the warm, suave and positive dating machine that viewers first came to love at the height of the pandemic, in 2020.

Sudeikis and some of the other “Ted Lasso” cast members recently visited President Joe Biden at the White House in March for a discussion on mental health.

There, the star called the character he plays “wish-fulfillment.”

“You know, ‘be the change you want to see in the world,'” Sudeikis told The Observer, paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi. Well, “how about ‘write the change you want to see in the world?’ Part of the joy of doing this wonderful job that I get to do is wish fulfillment. Not just playing the characters, but also knowing what want to broadcast to the world.”

The third season of “Ted Lasso” is currently streaming on Apple TV+. The series is produced by Warner Bros. Television, which, like CNN, is part of Warner Bros. Discovery.