Brendan Hunt knows you want to decode Coach Beard. He’s also pretty sure you never will. “Beard is the only character truly defined by his proximity to another character,” he shrugs, halfway through a riff on why you’re probably never getting a Beard spin-off — no matter how many pig noses you mail to Apple TV+. “It pains me financially to say, but I don’t think it’ll work.”
Not that he won’t indulge the idea. He’s quick to lean into the Amsterdam episode — or Sunflowers if you’re a romantic — that unspooled Beard on yet another shaggy adventure, full of bike rides, spiritual epiphanies, and a surreal nod to Hunt’s real life. “One thing I did when I lived there was get a band together and perform the entire Ziggy Stardust album,” he says. “At the last minute, Jason goes: ‘And a pig nose.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah. A pig nose.’”
Now the mythical Piggy Stardust spin-off is basically canon — at least in the minds of fans who want Ted Lasso’s emotional support coach to wander the multiverse in a squealing fever dream. Hunt doesn’t shut the door, exactly. “We’re one half-hour writing session away from a spin-off,” he deadpans. “Put some pig noses on the poster and we’ll talk.”
But all these breadcrumbs — toxic relationships, late-night escapades, philosophical monologues about happiness — they’re not accidents. Beard’s your favorite unreliable narrator for a reason. “I think he can be happy,” Hunt insists. “Everyone can, as long as they know who they are. We shouldn’t be thinking about happiness as an elimination of bad feelings. Happiness is what happens around them. It’s knowing the bad thoughts are finite. And compartmentalizing — that’s as close as I’d expect to get, and I suspect it’s true for Beard too.”
Spoken like a man who’s been tethered to his fictional alter ego for so long that the cracks have fully merged. “He’s always had me in him — it’s just starting to leak out,” Hunt says. He’s not kidding: bits of his real life keep slipping onto the page. He speaks Dutch, just like Beard. He’s familiar with a questionable relationship or two. And yes, he probably knows more about soccer than anyone else in the writers’ room. “We’re just shaking that particular jar and seeing which crumbs hit the floor.”
Of course, no Ted Lasso deep dive is complete without talking about the show’s secret weapon: the music. The gentle Kenny Rogers duet? Brian Eno soundtracking your feelings? Ice Cube when you least expect it? Hunt says it’s equal parts wizardry and thrift. “Try not to get too attached to a song in the script. If you write down that you really want that song, the price goes up. Quentin Tarantino does this trick — name a different song that’s close to what you want.”
Then it goes through what Hunt calls a “conveyor belt of people with good opinions of music.” Jason Sudeikis has final say, but Hunt’s fingerprints are there too. “Our editors have great thoughts, Joe has pitches, our music supervisor Tony Von Pervieux — the MVP TVP — is a genius. I mean, it’s working. We think it’s good. We may come to find we were wrong, but…”
And what about the “end”? The alleged final season? Hunt seems unfazed, and maybe that’s the lesson Beard’s been trying to teach us the whole time. The show’s already made — the rest is up to us to compartmentalize. “We can’t change course now,” he laughs. “It’s out there. We’ll see what the change brings about.”
So go ahead, spin your Piggy Stardust theories, your Coach Beard spin-offs, your weird Amsterdam backstories. Brendan Hunt will be here for it — grinning, semi-enlightened, and half-expecting you to slip a pig nose into his DMs.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
