If Nathan Shelley’s tears didn’t make it abundantly clear just how sorry he was for how he left things at the end of Ted Lasso Season 2, perhaps this will help.
On Friday, portrayer Nick Mohammed tweeted the apology letter Nate wrote to Ted — or, at least, a small piece of the apology letter he wrote to Ted. We saw Nate obsessing over it at the tail end of Season 3, Episode 11, at which point he was 60 pages deep and “looking for a few trims.”
What follows is Page 1 of Nate’s mea culpa, as shared in full:
“Apologies come in all shapes and sizes, but I can only be responsible for my own. I want it to be sincere and meaningful, whilst remaining true to my self. As I’ve discovered, this is easier said than done.
You know me, Ted. You know me better than so many people in my life. Better than my parents, who I no longer feel close to, but that’s a different story. Maybe one day we’ll sit down together with a beer and I can tell you it. I hope so! Sorry, I’m staying off topic and this is long enough already. So let me get straight to the point. It feels so strange just to type the words — words I would love to say directly to your kind moustached face — and I hope I will get a chance to do exactly that.
Anyway, I’m sorry for the amount of time I am taking to say sorry. If you’re still reading this I can only thank you, humbly, from the bottom of my heart. It means the world to me Ted. When you arrived at AFC Richmond, I felt like a light had turned on in a place I didn’t even realize was dark. It was the most extraordinary feeling to be valued and respected for my own merits in a way that had felt so rare in my life up until that point.
I’m sure you know all this already and so I don’t need to tell you, but that was all your doing. I can barely remember the person I was back then, in what I call the “pre-Ted era”, but I definitely didn’t like that guy. Okay I’m not saying it right. I hated that guy. I had so much self-loathing in me from my childhood and it all spilled over without me even realizing I believe a poet once said ‘to avoid is to be free yourself, to apologize is to free all.’ It is with this awareness that i humbly come to you with a dream. A dream of what we might one day be, built on the memory of what we were, minus the present of what we are today – with the hopes of changing that. I’m losing the point. What I’m trying to say is that I’m ready to free myself. To free us all. Does that make sense? Oh god. I hope it does. I so, deeply, deeply hope it does.
When I was a kid, my uncle used to say ‘It’ll end when it ends, and not before.’ In retrospect, that didn’t make a lot of sense but as a child I didn’t really clock that. I thought he was one of the wisest men on the planet just because of the way he treated my dad. He’s three years older which made him the only person to treat my terrifying father like a kid brother. Revelation to 8 year old me, as you can probably imagine. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase since.. everything that’s happened has happened and it resonates more now than it ever has. I hate endings, Ted. I carried on dating my last girlfriend long after we both realised it wasn’t working because I didn’t want to acknowledge the goodbye. It was quite horrible, actually.”
Mohammed previously shared a 2,200-word defense of Nate’s polarizing Season 3 arc, which you can find here.
Nate’s apology… page 1! Also this is Jason’s red pen 🥰 #TedLasso pic.twitter.com/YrscO82DSy
— Nick Mohammed (@nickmohammed) June 2, 2023
This story originally appeared on TVLine
