Before becoming an Emmy-winning star who played the foul-mouthed football icon Roy Kent in “Ted Lasso”, Brett Goldstein had been a stand-up comedian for almost two decades. But if you are looking for visual evidence, it can be difficult to come up with, as videos from his early days on stage are almost non -existent.
“I’ve done 17 years of stand-up, but there is no evidence,” he said with a laugh. “I could lie.”
This is because Goldstein was not a fan of filmed stand-up trees this year, when his “Brett Goldstein: the second best night of your life” came to HBO. “I’ve always resisted filming, and I’ve never put things I did online,” he said. “It’s about the live experience, and I feel it quite strong.”
“There is a pact you do with the audience, which I love. The exchange happens in a room with an audience, and when you take it out of the context and stick it on the internet for people to weigh in, I think somehow,” Yes, but it wasn’t for you. It was for the room where we did, ”he added.
But on the heels of his success with “Ted Lasso” (where he was hired as a writer and also ended by playing Kent) and “shrink” (where he is a co-creator and acted in season 2), Goldstein decided to take an offer to make an HBO special in the stand-up act he had toured. “And then it became this challenge: How do you make it work on the screen?” he said.
“I know it worked in the room, but how do you edit stand-up?” He said about the experience reworking of the action for the small screen. “How do you frame it? Where do you cut into a joke? Thankfully, I worked with brilliant people who knew what they were doing, because I was constantly like:” How do we make sure this is fun on the screen? “
The special comes from the first comprehensive tour he did in the wake of his success with “Ted Lasso”, for which he won two Emmys and became a household name. When it comes to whether the audience reacted differently to him when they knew him as Roy Kent, he can only speculate.
“I don’t know what people expected when they came to meet me,” he said. “It surprised me that they bought tickets without feeling like a stand-up. I think it probably worked to my advantage, because their expectations must have been very low.”
He laughed. “Maybe they thought I would come out and kick a ball and say” f-of “and leave, and that would be enough. But instead I came out and did stand-up like myself. In a way it is helpful, because I have promised them nothing and their expectations are low. So when I am a competent stand-up I seem to be really good.”
For the special, he shortened the set from 90 minutes to 60 minutes because “an hour sounds bearable at home”, and he cut out some of the imprints that were among his favorite things in the show. The special landed at HBO at about the same time as it was announced that “Ted Lasso” would return to a new season two years after getting out of the air in 2023, and shortly after “Shrinking” lost a second season where Goldstein played the drunken driver who killed the wife of the character played by Jason Sail.
But that type of schedule is typical for Goldstein, who has handled various jobs throughout his career. “I was always all three: writers, actors, stand-up,” said the native in London. “I got paid to do stand-up. I would make club plays four nights a week on average, but during the days I would write and act. It was enough to pay my bills and buy a cinema ticket once a week. It was always enough.”
Today he ends season 3 of “Shrinking” and he is back in the author’s room at “Ted Lasso”, which will shoot during the second half. He also prepares for the 2025 release of “You All”, a romantic comedy that he wrote with William Bridges about a somewhat futuristic society where a test can identify each person’s soul mate positively. (The test does not identify the characters played by the stars in the film, Goldstein and Imogen Poots, as soulmates, but of course the audience knows better.)
“I like to be busy and I’m very lucky to do all the things I do, but it’s a little crazy,” he said about his schedule – not that he wants to change it. “As long as I get, I would like to act, write and do stand-up. I would never want to stop any of them.”
“And I also think they all lead into each other. Stand-up is really good for your brain: the adrenaline when you are on stage makes your brain work so fast, and I think it keeps me sharp when I’m in the author’s room. And then you can take all this and put it in acting. They feed each other. It is a very happy system.”
A version of this story first appeared in the comedy issue of Thewrap’s Awards Magazine. Read more from the question here.
