What in God’s Name Is Going On with Coach Beard on Ted Lasso?

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I sometimes confuse apex and apotheosis. Are they mutually exclusive? All the international, cultural, political implications, and interactions of it just kick it up a notch as being something just so fascinating, the goods and the bads. So I never really tire of discussing it.”When last we saw Beard, three years ago in the finale of season 3, Beard faked a ruptured appendix to get off the flight home to Kansas, choosing to stay in the U.K. and marry his incendiary girlfriend, Jane, at an ancient druidic site. Esquire caught up with Hunt to analyze what’s happening with Coach Beard in the aftermath—and why you shouldn’t dare say the marriage happened at Stonehenge.ESQUIRE: You’re a writer on Ted Lasso, a producer, a cocreator. You’ve been with it from the start, so season 4: What’s it all about, man?BRENDAN HUNT: We’re still in the realm of mental health, and we’re still talking about “What is home?” especially with the Wizard of Oz of it all, which is running through it.Who is Beard in the Wizard of Oz framework?Unfortunately, I think he’s Toto. We literally say, “We’re not in Kansas anymore” in the pilot, and when memes and Reddit posts started to get into “This person is the Cowardly Lion and this person’s the Scarecrow,” I was like, Oh no … I’m just a dog. [Shrugs.] I’m very loyal.Apple TVDon’t expect to learn much more about Beard this season. “If we reveal too much, then we give up the ghost a little bit,” Brendan Hunt says.When we finally see Beard again in episode 2 this season, he’s gone a little feral. His hair has grown wild, and he has a haunted look in his eyes.Yes, when we see Beard, it’s immediately clear that he is perhaps not his best self. It’s just not necessarily clear if that’s his natural state of degradation when he is not in Ted’s company or if there’s something going on at home. And it’ll take us a minute to suss that out. But at the very least, it seems like a guy who’s happy that Ted’s back.The last we saw him was his Stonehenge wedding, right?Uh ... to the lawyers who own the Stonehenge IP, what my client means to say is “It had a stone construct that recalls Stonehenge in many ways.”I didn’t realize that was an issue. Somebody owns the rights to Stonehenge?Apparently, yes, which we found out after the fact. We were happy to honor this due to our tremendous respect for English cultural items.How is that possible? Surely Stonehenge is in the public domain. That’s what I would’ve thought too. But nope. Anyway, so that wedding definitely does not take place in Stonehenge.Okay, definitely not!But that is where we saw him last—marrying Jane.I wish I knew if [Beard] would find full contentment before he dies. That I do not know.She provoked a kind of hedonism or wildness in him. We didn’t always see them together, but he was volatile with her in his life.It’s fairly clear to those on the outside of that relationship that this is maybe not the healthiest relationship for either one of them. But for the two of them on the inside, there’s a passion that cannot be duplicated. They’re both clearly addicted, for good or for bad. Oh, and she’s got a belly bump in that wedding scene as well. Keen observers have noted.What’s going on there?Yeah, what is going on there? We’ll see.That is one of the mysteries that this season seems to be drawing out?We’re not going to let the people hang in for too long, but yes, we will keep a few plates spinning.With Beard, you accomplish so much with him in the negative space. He has this bigger, broader life that’s only hinted at. How much do you sketch out, and how much is actually a mystery to you as well?Well, “negative space” is a really great way to put it. I haven’t heard that before, so I tip my cap. It comes back to when we were talking about Beard in the writers room in season 1. We always talked about the crazy stuff that Beard gets up to. It got as far as [proposing] a scene of Ted in the pub talking to someone, and then we the audience see that, up on the TV screen, Beard is getting out of a limo with his date, Elizabeth Hurley. Then this goes away and we never comment on it. So we always felt like there’s weird stuff going on with him, but we never actually present any of it.You finally did sort of do that with episode 9 of season 2, where we follow Beard away from the team during one particularly wild night.An unexpected ancillary benefit of the “Beard After Hours” episode is now the audience’s go-to assumption that whatever we’re not seeing is at the extreme. Now Beard has gone full-out since we saw him last. We don’t know why; we don’t know how. And to have that as the audience’s default setting for the character is a pretty fun thing to play with.Apple TVIt’s not just you—something’s off with Beard when we meet him this season. “When we see Beard, it’s immediately clear that he is perhaps not his best self,” Hunt says.I hesitate to bring this up since you reacted so negatively to being compared to Toto, but...[Laughs.] Oh, go on.There’s an element of Snoopy about Beard too, right? Snoopy always has insane things going on that have nothing to do with Charlie Brown. He’s got the most interesting life of all the Peanuts.Very much. As a Peanuts devotee, I’ll take that. I’ll take that for sure.They’re looking for the Great Pumpkin while Snoopy is graduating from Harvard Law, you know what I mean?Not only does Snoopy defend the West against Nazi pilots, but he also knows how to wear a catcher’s mask and put a mitt on. He’s very handy out in a sports environment as well. So yeah, man, I love that. I’ll take that all the way home.So when we see the wild and woolly “Forrest Gump running across the country” look that Beard has in season 4, it suggests something troubling has happened to him. Why does that mystery work in a story like this?I don’t know. There’s just something about the balance of that character, though. With the exception of that one episode, we have been very judicious about what we reveal about him. If we reveal too much, then we give up the ghost a little bit. We can only know so much about an enigma before it’s not an enigma anymore. So even revealing his first name [Willis] finally at the end of season 3 was like, Is that too much? In the end, it’s just about leaving enough breadcrumbs that the audience fills in the gaps in their own ways.Beard strikes me a little bit like these mythic figures in a Coen brothers film. You have Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men or the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona. They’re not quite human and almost demigods in a way.We went from Toto to Snoopy to a pair of murderers. I’m intoxicated by this! He’s in touch with his spiritual but not religious side, at the very least. And he certainly believes in the supernatural, but I don’t think he would think of himself as a potential exponent of it.What is it that you wish you knew about Beard that you don’t?I wish I knew if he would find full contentment before he dies. That I do not know.He’ll probably wonder that too, right?Yeah, but he also wants to live in the moment, so it’s hard to say. He’s still surrendering to the demons every now and again. He’s still having his struggles and trying to get through stuff. So, golly, where would he be without Ted? He’s still trying to work that out.