‘Ted Lasso’: Phil Dunster Says He Had To Trust The Writers To Transform Him From Villain To Hero

The new Jamie Tartt is very different from the old Jamie Tartt. Played by 31-year-old English actor Phil Dunster, the Jamie Tartt who closes the third and likely final season of “Ted Lasso” is sincere, frank and emotionally mature – a far cry from the arrogant, selfish football star and playboy we met in the first season. series season.

That Tartt was self-absorbed and showy, a guy who never wanted to share the ball with anyone on the field and a thorn in the side of anyone who had to put up with him, including his AFC Richmond coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis); his personal rival turned personal trainer, Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Keeley Jones (Juno Temple). In recent episodes of the hit Apple TV+ comedy, we’ve seen Tartt opening up to these characters, among others, and learning to forgive his abusive father (Kieran O’Brien). Most surprising of all, he has become the Premier League assists leader – the cocky, showy player has become a member of the team.

In last Wednesday’s final chapter –Warning, slight spoilers front–, Tartt is called to do a commercial for Nike in Brazil, has a long-awaited frank conversation with Roy Kent and visits his father, who is recovering – showing how he has evolved in the last three years.

It was a drastic reinvention of a character previously known only for his bad boy attitude. And Dunster, faced with the challenge of making this transformation convincing, wasn’t sure he could pull it off.

“I was terrified all the time,” he admitted, speaking last week on a video call from his London apartment. “Each time I read a new script, I thought, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’

Dunster says Sudeikis, the star and co-creator of the series, helped him, especially in an important scene in episode 11 in which Tartt breaks down and cries from the stress he feels in the face of an imminent match in front of his hometown crowd.

“There are some really nice things that people said after that episode. The honest answer is that it was Jason’s idea,” Dunster said.

Affable and thoughtful, often looking off into the distance before speaking, Dunster seemed interested in reflecting on “Ted Lasso” as the series drew to a close. (No official announcement has yet been made about the show’s future after Wednesday’s season three finale, but there are no plans at the moment for more episodes or spinoffs.) He looked back on the casting process with wistful pleasure, speaking of a refined English tone that forms a stark contrast to his character’s Manchester accent.

At the time, he said, Tartt was called Dani Rojas, which was “what the character Jamie is today, but possibly European or South American, representing possible hometowns for many star players who may have a certain diva spirit.” (Dani Rojas later became a separate character, a football-loving Mexican “Poliana” played by Cristo Fernández.)

Dunster auditioned for the role speaking “in a sort of Spanish accent”, he said, which “wasn’t quite what they were looking for”. He figured it had come to nothing. But one afternoon when he was playing volleyball some time later, he got a call from his agent saying that the producers wanted him back, this time without the Spanish accent.

“I was asked to find an accent that was representative of footballers in the UK and didn’t sound like myself,” said Dunster. Immediately he thought of Manchester, home to the famous teams Manchester United and Manchester City, the latter the reigning champions of the Premier League. Instead of “myself”, Tartt says “me-self”. “Keeley” he pronounces like “Kee-lah.”

“I tried to draw the character in my head with a certain daring,” Dunster said. “It was a bit of a generalized representation: a fame-hungry young man who has a distorted view of celebrity and thinks that to have longevity in football you have to be as braggart as possible.”

He was careful, at first, not to soften Jamie’s rougher edges too much. He needed to allow himself to be the bad boy, at least for a while.

“It was easier to play him as unsympathetic and let the script show that he could be redeemed,” Dunster said. “What we need to do is not disrupt the script, right?”

But his vision of the character, to which his status as a lifelong football fan contributed, ended up dictating much of how the character was written, he explained, right down to the jokes that revolve around Dunster’s nasal accent. (One of season three’s most memorable lines relies on his singular pronunciation of a colloquial term for excrement.) Sudeikis encouraged the actors to “massage the text” so that it felt right for each of them, Dunster said, “whether that was anglicizing him, jamify him or whatever it took.”

Dunster grew up in Reading, England and was interested in acting from an early age, having been in school productions that garnered him attention both at school and at home.

“I won’t say that I became an actor solely because I played Oliver in a school production when I was in third grade, but it’s a fact that that’s when I started to enjoy showing off,” he said.

Although he comes from a military family – both his father and his brother served in the armed forces – his family supported his decision to try to become a professional actor, enrolling in the Bristol Old Vic Theater School. This was partly, as he wryly explained, because “they knew I had zero academic skills, so they said ‘yeah, man, you don’t have a knack for anything else’.”

After graduating, Dunster went on to be a waiter at an Asian restaurant in Brixton, but after a single shift he realized he wasn’t cut out for it.

“I screwed up, man. I had someone to guide me, but I managed to get it all wrong anyway,” he said. When he was on the bus heading home, he became despondent. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing? I can’t be an actor if I have to.'”

Fortunately, he didn’t have to: almost immediately after that he was offered a major role in the British period film “The Rise of the Krays”, and in an instant Phil Dunster went from an eager recent graduate to a professional actor who has been working steadily ever since.

He first got noticed with roles in the sitcom “Catastrophe” (2015-2019) and Kenneth Branagh’s film “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017). But it was joining the cast of “Ted Lasso” in 2020 that raised his profile tremendously as the series became a pandemic-era phenomenon, pleasing audiences and critics alike with its sweetly comic sincerity.

Despite the series’ stratospheric success in the United States, however, it has not achieved notable cultural recognition in the United Kingdom.

“I keep telling my friends, ‘Guys, I swear I’m famous in America,'” Dunster joked. He managed to convince them to watch the series, but the effect of “Ted Lasso’s” popularity on his career has been difficult to gauge.

On the one hand, he said, “It’s easier to get called into meetings in the US than it is here, so it’s not something I take for granted.” On the other hand, the very notion of success and ratings at home versus abroad can be an unnecessary distraction.

“It’s easy to let my attention be focused on that rather than the actual work,” he explained.

“It’s an insidious thing. You see how it gets to people – the desire to follow the fallout. It’s important not to fly too close to the sun, like one guy did in ancient Greece.”

“Ted Lasso” is primarily a show about kindness — about finding the good in others and bringing out the good in us. This includes Jamie Tartt, who, Dunster said, ended up “being driven by love rather than being driven by hate”, something he never thought the character would choose. Perhaps not surprisingly, his time spent working on “Lasso” taught Dunster about the importance of “working with good people”. Now that the series is winding down, at least for now, that’s what he’ll be looking for again.

“The role can be anyone – big or small, a good guy or a bad guy, a prime minister or the opposite of a prime minister,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter as long as the people doing it are good.”