Jason Sudeikis' complicated real life has tarnished the fantasy of Ted Lasso

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https://www.vox.com/culture/23655029...-wilde-breakup

The Jason Sudeikis-Olivia Wilde breakup changed the way watching Ted Lasso feels.

By Constance Grady
Mar 29, 2023, 6:00am EDT

On the just-premiered third season of Ted Lasso, Apple TV+’s feel-good hit comedy, the big theme is about handling the bad things people say about you. Each character is facing cruel gossip and slander from former friends. The underdog British soccer club at the center of the show has to weather a cruel press narrative from pundits who predict they’ll finish their season in last place.

It takes advice from sweet Ted Lasso, the fish-out-of-water American football coach played by co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis, for the team to figure out how to cope with it all. After a patented Lasso pep talk in the season premiere, they’re able to conclude that other people’s opinions are “just poopy.”

This preoccupation with how to handle what people are saying about you has some extra resonance right now because Sudeikis has been facing an unfriendly publicity narrative for the past year. And that narrative complicates the sunshiney fantasy Ted Lasso plays with so adeptly.

The fantasy of Ted Lasso is: What if a man you expected to be toxic was actually good? What if he was honorable and kind and devoted to helping people become better versions of themselves? What if he was the new masculine ideal, showing us ways of being a man that were worth aspiring to?

But over the long hiatus between seasons, Sudeikis went through an extremely messy public split from his former fiancée, Olivia Wilde, with whom he shares two children. Sudeikis’s public reactions to the split were neither criminal nor violent, but they were suggestive of more malice and vindictiveness than anything sweet, fictional Ted would ever dream of.

That’s a problem for Ted Lasso, which consistently encourages a slippage between Sudeikis and his saintly character. Just this week, Sudeikis went to the White House in character as Ted Lasso to talk about mental health. In a 2021 GQ profile, Sudeikis posed for the photoshoot in character and told the interviewer that while he thinks Ted is “the best version of himself,” his friends say, “No, that is you. That is you. That’s not the best version of you.”

“It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever made,” Sudeikis said.

In the publicity narrative of the show, Sudeikis and nice-guy mustachioed Ted are supposed to be one and the same. So then what do you do when the figure who’s supposed to represent the new masculine ideal turns out to be just another flawed human being?