TVLINE | The finale ultimately keeps Ted at Richmond, but in a very different role: He and Beard are now assistants to Alice. What made that the right next step for Ted, rather than, say, having him return as head coach of the men’s team?
If we had had Ted just go straight back to the men’s team, it would have made this whole season be like a favor to women’s football — to just come in for a moment as a tourist and then be on our way. It would not have been a very Ted move, first of all, but it would have been a disservice to the sport. We’re here to do this properly. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re above a quick, tiny little fake-out for people, but yeah, that was never in the cards for Ted.
TVLINE | Maybe this is what you’re referring to, because in that last scene in Rebecca’s office, Ted mentions a vacancy, and it leaves you thinking before the reveal: “Is he going to hand Alice the team and go back to the men?”
No. He’s referring to the vacant women’s manager’s position. He just says “your newly vacant manager’s position.” She doesn’t know yet that the women’s manager position is now vacant.
TVLINE | Clever wording, sir.
Thank you. We also confused a bunch of people. Yeah, it’s a misdirect, but a legitimate one, I think.
TVLINE | Ted’s gift to Alice at the end is ultimately this promotion to head coach, which she has more than earned. But back in Episode 2, before he rescinded his going-away gift, was he going to offer her his job then, only to realize that he needed to stick around and mentor her? Or did he have a different gift in mind?
No, that was the gift for her, but that was because he was gonna send her off with the full confidence that, “Hey, you’re gonna be a manager somewhere. And so I made this nameplate as a North Star.” And then somewhere between getting that thing made and the day he gave it to her, he realized, “No, I gotta give her one more push. There’s something special here, and we need her on board.” So he was not yet planning on stepping down, but he could see from the beginning that she was coach material, and she just needed to work on a few things.
TVLINE | Did you guys have that reveal that it was Alice who was messing with Ted’s chair up your sleeves all season, just waiting to drop it, or is that something you came up with later?
Jason was really into the chair thing very early on, and [Ted] didn’t mention [anything was wrong with his chair to] Alice until later, but that does not mean that [Jason] didn’t think of the Alice thing from the beginning. He doesn’t always mention everything he’s thinking of. Only the inner workings of his mind know for sure, but that was definitely all him. And that was not a writers’ room thing. That was something that started happening on set. But if I had to wager, I’d bet that he was picturing that it was Alice all along. He just didn’t care to share it until necessary.
TVLINE | We last see Roy and Keeley walking out of Nelson Road after Roy packs up his office to take the head coaching job at Chelsea. Initially, I wondered if that meant Brett Goldstein might be leaving ahead of a potential Season 5. But Roy’s role as head coach of Richmond’s men’s team wasn’t really central to this season, and there’s clearly more story to tell with Roy and Keeley now that they have a baby on the way. Is it safe to say Roy doesn’t need to be a coach at Richmond to remain part of the Richmond family?
Yeah, spot on. There’s also the reality of Brett does a lot of things. He’s got a lot of gigs. And so this does allow us to potentially have our cake and eat it too, or particularly Brett to have his cake and eat it too. But yeah, as you say, we’re not dealing with the men’s team anyway. So to the degree that Roy is here as part of Keeley’s life, his job is kind of immaterial to what that is. And despite what we make it look like in Episode 8, Chelsea is not that far away as long as you plan well. So have a car that isn’t stupid. There’s no reason to think that he’s gone forever.
TVLINE | But it does sound like this is potentially a solve for a logistical hurdle if, say, you don’t have Brett in as many episodes, right?
Yeah, if Brett is suddenly James Bond or something, then we can’t fight that. We can’t fight that. And that’s the government. That’s the British government coming to kick our a—. So yeah, it gives us wiggle room for wherever we may be, should we have a Season 5 and should we have a Goldstein schedule to navigate.
TVLINE | I take it you can’t confirm that Brett Goldstein is James Bond…?
I cannot confirm that. I can only tell you what’s in my heart.
TVLINE | There are a lot of familiar faces in the finale, but Sam and Nate are the only returning players who actually get to speak. And both serve a purpose in Roy’s story: Sam helps him process the Chelsea offer, while Nate’s return gives you an opportunity to reunite the Diamond Dogs when Roy needs them most. Was that selectivity intentional? Or did any of the other returning characters have dialogue or scenes that wound up on the cutting-room floor?
No, there’s nothing on the cutting-room floor. That was the gist of it. And Sam’s dialogue was a fairly late add. We’d had from the very beginning that [with] the last game of the season, that the win that day would be that they sold out, and that the game wouldn’t matter by then. And we knew early on that, whether we saw them earlier or not — and there was talk that maybe we would see them earlier in the season — that one way or another, we see the men’s team supporting the women’s team, and that that could be a more palpable passing-of-the-torch moment. So we always knew that was gonna be the situation.
We didn’t know for sure what we were gonna do with Nate. We definitely wanted to have Nate come around. We went back and forth on a lot of things. I can’t even remember what other ideas we had, but then it was like, “OK, where is he? He’s in Poland. Of course, Poland!” And finding a way to get him in for one last Diamond Dogs just felt pretty irresistible once we got to it.
TVLINE | When we spoke after Episode 6, I asked whether Alice’s relationship with her partner would play a larger role in the final four episodes. You told me, and I quote, “That I don’t think I should answer.” But then we never saw her partner again. So I have to ask: Why so cryptic? Was there more to that storyline at one point? Did something get cut?
I don’t know, man. It might’ve been your f—king attitude. [Laughs] Why would I have been cryptic about it? I guess just to the degree that to answer that would have given anything away what happened with Alice’s return [following her suspension], and how well it would or would not go, basically. And also, you don’t wanna tell someone like, “Oh no, that new character? You never see them again.” Having said that, if we get the chance to do more, then we do hope to see that character again because we liked her a lot.
TVLINE | At the end of Season 3, Ted says the story was never really about him. And a lot of this season is about him, in the background, learning that he doesn’t always need to have the answers. He can just be present for the people in his life without offering folksy words of wisdom. Alice is now leading the team, and Ted is her No. 2. What does that look like in practice? Does he cede things like the pregame pep talks? And does taking that step back professionally free Ted up for more story in his personal life in a potential Season 5 — particularly after establishing that he’s ready to open his heart to someone new?
Those will be the questions, yeah. Certainly his intent is to have more Ted time — and he specifically says it in terms of Henry. But certainly he was slow on the draw with the stage manager and then paid a price for that. So those are certainly threads that we would want to continue to follow with Ted.
But also, what are the realities of being an assistant coach? You don’t necessarily get to set your schedule as much as Ted thinks. Particularly, he doesn’t get to decide. The boss gets to decide. And what kind of head coach is Alice gonna be to her staff? I don’t know. We’ll see.
TVLINE | Beard is probably the only person who knows that Ted’s in for a rude awakening.
He might. He’ll be there to teach Ted the ropes.
TVLINE | Rebecca heads into a potential Season 5 with a lot of her professional and personal uncertainties resolved. She doesn’t have to worry about losing majority control of the club, and she’s newly engaged to Matthijs. Do you suspect we’ll see her struggling to fill Roy’s vacancy? Or does this newfound stability create room to focus more on her personal life, in the same way Ted serving as assistant coach might create room for his?
I don’t know how much of the men’s team we’re gonna see going forward, now that the coach will presumably be someone we don’t know. And again, seeing the fellas there was meant to be a bit of a passing-the-torch moment.
Look, we’ve never known whether or not there’s gonna be more than this, but we’ve sort of been playing it with hopes that we would [have more beyond Season 4]. And that is why, in terms of the [women’s] team, we’ve just seen little bits of them, because we’re taking a long view. If you go back to Season 1, we didn’t learn much about the players outside of Jamie and Roy, and a little bit of Sam. Season 2, we started to get going on them and really [delving into] their stories. And by Season 3, then we get to Colin and stuff like that. So we were very judicious with how much we meet the team and get to know them for that reason.
Taking a long view — is that a little presumptuous? Maybe…
TVLINE | But it does seem like you guys came back with another three-season arc in mind.
We’ll see about that. But at the very least, by having the men sort of officially pass the torch, in a manner of speaking, it frees us up to be with the [women’s] team more as well.
TVLINE | So much of what has historically ailed these characters — Ted, Nate, so many — has been rooted in the relationships they had with their parents; for Beard, of course, it was his relationship with his mother; and Rebecca has carried the scars of her relationship with Rupert. By the end of this season, they seem to have turned a corner, even more so than they did by the end of Season 3. Do you see this finale as these characters finally breaking free some of those patterns rooted in past trauma, and not letting that baggage define them in a hypothetical Season 5?
I like the sound of that. Everyone’s gone through something this season that has landed them in a better spot to get whatever is their next plateau. Ted was able to confront something in regard to his dad by finally telling Henry about it, and that can only have brought them a little bit closer.
And you have the rumblings of Henry not being happy out in London. He’s had a few toss-away lines about being in London and about Dad coaching a girls’ team. So Ted sees those alarm bells and just wants to be there for him. I hope everyone’s got fun stuff coming and are doing it from a good place. But I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that Beard’s all settled.
TVLINE | Let’s end on that. Because the internet had a field day with Episode 9. There was a particular screenshot of you going around with the parted hair, the tan, the piercing blue contacts, the earring. The hair in particular, with the silver vest… was that Jamie Tartt-inspired?
Not on my end. The hair was more meant to be Hugh Grant in “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” It ended up not quite as tousled, but that was kind of what Beard’s going for there.
And once we started adding clothes to the mix, there were a whole bunch of options on the rack that would go out to my room. What we landed on ended up being a bit Jamie, and maybe that was intentional on the part of our fantastic [costume] designer Jacky [Levy]. But no, it was never, on my end anyway, consciously, “Let’s make him look like Jamie.”
This story originally appeared on TVLine
