LONDON — Tanya Reynolds had never watched an episode of “Ted Lasso” before she was approached to audition for the fourth season of the Apple TV+ comedy. But the British actor sent in a tape anyway.“It was just one scene and it was really funny,” Reynolds says. It’s a busy Saturday morning in central London and we’re huddled in the basement of an equally busy coffee shop. Reynolds, 34, seems surprisingly relaxed considering today marks the final two performances of “1536,” a play she’s been starring in at the Ambassadors Theatre since early May. She’s still incredulous that anyone would think of her to play Alice Chilton, a coach for A.F.C. Richmond’s new women’s team, the latest addition to the series.“It was mad,” she says, her eyes wide. “The thought of me playing a coach was quite funny. I’m not strong. But the scene was funny and it was like nothing I’d ever done before.”A week after sending in the tape, “Ted Lasso” co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis asked Reynolds to hop on a Zoom call. “I assumed it was part of the audition process,” she says. “We had a chat and then at the end he was like, ‘Well, we’d love you to do it if you want.’ I went away and watched all three seasons, and I loved it. It’s the kind of telly I seek — light and soft and heartwarming and optimistic.”But Reynolds was hesitant to accept the role without seeing any scripts. Sudeikis gave her a rundown of Alice, a tough ex-soccer player with a brusque coaching style, but Reynolds had never said yes to a job without actually reading the project. But the scripts never came.“I messaged him [Sudeikis] and said, ‘Look, can I please be sent even one script so I can just hear this character’s voice? Or can we have a Zoom because I have loads of questions?’” she says. “It’s like if you’re a carpenter and someone’s like, ‘Can you make this table?’ But you’re not given the tools. I needed to know what it was.”Sudeikis says he didn’t offer the scripts because “I didn’t think they were ready for someone who was clearly so discerning to read.”“Tanya has tremendous integrity as an artist,” he says, speaking over video call from Los Angeles. “What delighted me as much as her performance was her concern and care, like ‘How can I serve this piece?’ I talked her through everything, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever done in the three seasons prior. I told her character arc. I may have even told her the final shot of the season.” Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) and Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds) in “Ted Lasso.” (Apple TV) Still, Reynolds was unsure. She didn’t picture herself as a former professional athlete or as someone whom Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) refers to as a “bulldog.” She remembers making a series of excuses to Sudeikis.“I said, ‘I’ve never kicked ball in my life. I don’t know anything about football. I’m more Chihuahua than bulldog,’” Reynolds says. Sudeikis shrugged, and, in classic Ted Lasso style, told her he thought she could do it.Reynolds first auditioned for “Ted Lasso” in the spring of 2025 while appearing in a production of “The Seagull” at the Barbican in London. She almost immediately went on to the initial run of “1536” at the Almeida Theatre, then to Wales to play Caroline Bingley in “The Other Bennet Sister.” It was somewhere during that “whirlwind” that she finally acquiesced.“I could see myself in that world and wanted to be part of it,” she says. “I didn’t want to f— it up. But with Jason giving me the thumbs up I said, ‘OK.’”Although she did eventually get to see three scripts before production began, joining “Ted Lasso” was daunting. The Emmy-winning series, which had seemingly ended after its third season only to be renewed for a fourth, had made many in its cast stars. Reynolds admits to feeling emotionally unprepared even at the best of times. “I have impostor syndrome getting out of bed, just doing my own life,” she says. “So this was like impostor syndrome to the max.”She joined a gym and started strength training, not necessarily to bulk up but to feel strong. She watched as much soccer as she could and read player autobiographies. Her cousin’s wife is Austrian footballer Verena Hanshaw, who currently plays for FK Austria.“After one of her games, she walked towards us and the closer she got, I was amazed by the strength that she has,” Reynolds says. “Meanwhile, you take one look at me and you know: That girl, she’s never done a [push] up in her life.”She laughs, adding, “To be honest, my tracksuit on the show does a lot of the heavy lifting.” “I could see myself in that world and wanted to be part of it,” Reynolds says about joining the cast of “Ted Lasso.” (Ebru Yildiz / For The Times) Alice makes her first appearance in the season’s second episode. Rebecca and Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) have enticed Ted back to England from Kansas to coach their new women’s team, a motley group of players desperately in need of Ted’s guidance. Alice has been hired as the team’s assistant manager. She’s stern, unsmiling and outspoken, although there is, of course, a soft center under that hard exterior.“It’s not a spoiler to say that she does unfurl,” Reynolds says. “We can expect that from ‘Ted Lasso.’ You take a mean character and they don’t stay mean.”Sudeikis says Alice was inspired by his history working for female bosses, including Tina Fey at “Saturday Night Live.”“Alice embodied this understandable and quantifiable frustration and anger at a system that has kept [women] at arm’s length, especially in certain positions of power,” he says. “We can put people in boxes based on the vessel they’re born into, whether that be male or female or a certain level of attractiveness. But we don’t have to exist in the box that others put us in or that we keep ourselves in. It was exciting to see the Alice character going through that journey like we’ve done with other characters.”Reynolds’ impostor syndrome didn’t dissipate once she got to set, particularly as Episode 2 pits Alice against Rebecca. Alice demands to know whether Rebecca considered any women for the head coaching job, sending Rebecca spiraling to prove she is, in fact, a feminist. The episode ends with a tense confrontation between the two characters.“I remember filming that scene and trying to be intimidating to Hannah Waddingham,” Reynolds says. “I was looking up at her and trying to square my shoulders and feeling like a worm in a tracksuit. I was trying so hard to be tough and to be a bulldog. And Alice is trying to be tough and taken seriously, but actually she’s wobbly, like I was.”Waddingham, who knew Reynolds from working together on “Sex Education,” enjoyed the energy the actor brought to the character.“For Alice to call out Rebecca in the second episode shows us how powerful this new season is going to be,” Waddingham says, speaking in a voice memo. “She is a version of the relationship that Rebecca has with Keeley, but in a very different way.”She adds that Reynolds has “a stillness, an economy of movement and an economy of expression that I find so striking.”“That has always made me want to lean into her performance, both on screen as a fellow actor and watching her from afar,” Waddingham says. “It’s so glorious that she thought there had been some mistake in casting her as Alice Chilton. It speaks to how humble she is [and] how quite frankly unaware of her immense talent she is.”The process of playing Alice became easier as filming went on. The writers adapted the character to suit Reynolds’ strengths and personality, which is something Sudeikis says they’ve always done for the cast. She found a rhythm with Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard. She describes the longtime collaborators as having a “seamless rapport.”“It’s like they’re tossing a ball to each other back and forth,” she says. “When you add Alice’s resistance to their joy into it, it’s a good recipe for comedy.” “It’s so glorious that she thought there had been some mistake in casting her as Alice Chilton,” says Hannah Waddingham about her co-star Reynolds. “It speaks to how humble she is [and] how quite frankly unaware of her immense talent she is.” (Ebru Yildiz / For The Times) After filming the second episode, Reynolds began to loosen up. She compares it to holding on to the side of a swimming pool, afraid to let go. She soon realized that, actually, she could touch the bottom. Or just float.“I realized it was OK to not feel like I had it all figured out because nobody does,” she says. “That mirrors what Alice is going through. Alice is trying to be this tough coach and she wants to be good at everything she does, and she’s getting in her own way. The minute she lets go is when she starts to become a better coach and it’s when she starts to become more human. I was going on a parallel journey with her.”Reynolds is aware that her anxiety puts her at odds with everything that comes along with her chosen career. She panics on red carpets and says interviews make her nervous, although she certainly doesn’t seem it today. It’s the acting part she loves.“I overthink everything,” she says. “I’m like a woodland creature who bolts at loud noises. Being on stage is my safe space because I’m being someone else and I’m in another world and I know what I am in that world.”She adds, “Sometimes when things get hard I just remind myself why I’m an actor. And I’m an actor because I f—ing love pretending to be other people. I just want to be as many different people as I possibly can in this lifetime. It requires stepping out of your comfort zone a lot, because otherwise you end up playing yourself and that’s not what I want to do.”Reynolds has been acting professionally for a decade. She landed her first big role in 2016 on the British TV series “Delicious.” She assumed her life would immediately change after it aired, but instead between the second and third seasons, she was forced to go back to her day job at London’s Secret Cinema to pay the bills. It was “Sex Education,” which premiered on Netflix in 2019, that changed her trajectory.“I auditioned for it while I was working at Secret Cinema and I was incredibly depressed because I was auditioning and not getting anything,” she says. “And then success fell out of the sky. I found out I got the job on a Thursday and I started on the Monday.”Since then, Reynolds played Mrs. Augusta Elton in Autumn de Wilde’s “Emma,” and starred on TV shows like “I Hate You” and “The Decameron.” Embodying Caroline Bingley in “The Other Bennet Sister” was a recent highlight.“I will go to my grave defending that woman,” she says of Caroline. “She is deeply misunderstood. She’s a total victim of the societal constructs of men having all the power, and women having none unless they’re hitched to a man.”Next up, Reynolds is stepping behind the camera to direct her debut feature, “Dog Person,” which she also wrote and will star in alongside Hugh Bonneville and James Norton. She hopes it will start shooting this year.“This is my baby,” she says. “It’s actually impostor syndrome to the max and really terrifying, but I know what this film is. I’ve watched it 100 times in my head.”It’s perhaps because Reynolds is so familiar with overcoming feelings of insecurity that she understood Alice so well. She was worried at first that viewers would be put off by Alice’s severity. But she also knows it’s that journey of understanding that makes “Ted Lasso” so compelling.“She is very flawed,” Reynolds says. “But there’s so much underneath and there’s so much more we don’t even get to. She’s a big, juicy, delicious onion. There’s so much more to her than what’s on the surface.”
