Alien erotica, football coaching and making Meryl Streep cry: Ted Lasso’s new star Tanya Reynolds opens up

By the time its third season came to an end in 2023, Ted Lasso was a Big Deal. The cosy comedy about an indefatigably positive American football coach gee-whizzing his way into the hearts of a London football team had won 13 Emmys and racked up more than 25bn minutes of viewing.

Contributing exactly zero minutes to this staggering stat was Tanya Reynolds, who joins the series in its fourth season as Ted’s assistant coach, Alice.

“I don’t know where I was!” she tells me with a helpless shrug as we chat. “I mean, I am a bit of a hermit. I do sort of live under a rock, so it’s not surprising I missed it.” She had heard of it, she assures me, and accepted the invitation to audition because it was “so unlike anything I’ve done before. I just was like: ‘Football coach. Mad. Yeah, OK.’” A week after sending her tape and thinking nothing more of it “because I didn’t think it was very good”, Tanya had a Zoom with the show’s co-creator, writer and titular star, Jason Sudeikis, who offered her the part on the spot. She swiftly watched all three seasons and realised “I really want to be part of this world”.

She’s speaking from her north London home on a Monday morning – every hermit’s favourite time to meet a prying journalist who is snooping at your background (I spot candles, books – Tanya recommends her favourites on Instagram – and a huge painting of sunflowers, which she swings her camera towards so I can get a better look). In a sleeveless red top, her hair in a scrunchy, Reynolds is blissfully free of media-training gloss – her answers are peppered with pauses and rephrasings (or perhaps they’re just a result of her being a “nervous person”). She is also warm, never far from a face-splitting laugh and, like all self-respecting Brits, mocks herself routinely and expertly.

‘I am a bit of a hermit. I do sort of live under a rock’ … says Reynolds. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

As we settle, amid apologies about her whirring washing machine (“I’m hoping it chills out. You know when it goes mental?”), I ask about Meryl Streep and Martin Short coming to see 1536, the play she is starring in when we speak, with Margot Robbie as co-producer.

“We’d known they were coming for weeks. We actually graffitied it backstage: MERYL STREEP IS COMING ON THE TENTH!” she says. “We all stood on the stage, lined up like …” she does her best impression of an old-timey family portrait, “and couldn’t speak. But they were so kind … We all cried. Meryl cried. It was lovely.”

She adds that “Margot’s input has been huge … It’s so wonderful that someone with that amount of power is championing really important work, new work.” And how beautiful is she in real life, on a scale of one to obscene? Reynolds laughs. “She’s like a painting that’s come to life.”

1536 is the latest entry on Reynolds’s impressive theatrical CV, which also includes playing Masha in The Seagull last year opposite Cate Blanchett, and being nominated for an Olivier award in 2024 for her performance in A Mirror at the Almeida. But many will still know her best for her breakout role in Netflix’s Sex Education as Lily Iglehart – the space-bun sporting, cosplaying teen writer of alien erotica (The Trial of Glenoxi: Fucklord of the Universe being one of her efforts). The show proved a hotbed for young talent, with Ncuti Gatwa and Aimee Lou Wood among the cast. “I remember feeling in my very first days: ‘I am in the presence of superstars,’” says Reynolds.

Reynolds with Siena Kelly in 1536. Photograph: Helen Murray

She has since become a TV fixture, starring in Netflix’s bubonic plague romp The Decameron, in which she stole the show as wild maid turned “noblewoman” Licisca, and the BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister, where she played a deliciously disdainful Caroline Bingley (please Google the primrose-eating scene). There have been films, too, including Alice Lowe’s era-hopping comedy Timestalker.

Encouraged by Lowe, Reynolds wrote her own film, Dog Person, which she will direct (“I’m definitely terrified, for sure”) and star in, alongside Hugh Bonneville and James Norton. “Hopefully” shooting this year, it follows a thirtysomething woman, exhausted by life’s pressures, who “discovers this desire to be a dog”. (As if by magic, her own dog, a shaggy rescue called Borage, pads in at this point, after a trip to the vet).

Born in Hemel Hempstead into “not a theatrical family at all” (her Italian dad was a builder and her mum a sign painter – both were “quite quiet and quite shy”), Reynolds decided, aged four “or maybe six”, to be an actor. Where did that come from?

“I don’t. Know,” she enunciates. “I was always showing off and I remember my mum saying: ‘You’re brilliant at acting,’ and something in my brain was like: ‘Oh, I’ll do that.’ My parents, even though they we were not even adjacent to that world … never made it seem like it would be hard.” She was the first person in her family to go to university before winning a fully funded scholarship to the Oxford School of Drama – the only way she could afford to go.

Given that she “never had a backup plan”, what does she think about the decline of drama in schools? “It’s crazy to me that drama’s even on the chopping block of the curriculum,” she says. “That breaks my heart … The drama department was always my safe space. It’s so upsetting to me that there are kids that may not be able to explore that side of themselves because of government cuts. What is happening? It’s absolutely mad.”

If there is a through-line in Reynolds’s career, it is refreshingly complex characters – flawed, forthright, spiky, violent. Playing Licisca, she says, helped her find her “feral” side. “It’s always been there but it never comes out – unless in a medieval costume!”

Reynolds with Jason Sudeikis in Ted Lasso’s fourth season. Photograph: Colin Hutton/Apple

Coach Alice is another complicated proposition. She glowers through much of my allotted four episodes, eyeing Ted’s proffered high fives as if she might catch rabies, or worse, fun. But there are glimmers of an unfurling. “I was quite scared at the thought of playing someone tough. The thought of me being tough is hilarious. Because I am a cheese string,” she laughs. “[But] she’s almost performing at the beginning … Particularly in fields that have been historically male-dominant, I think women can often feel they have to present as the opposite to what is typically regarded as feminine. Alice is trying to be this sturdy, unemotional, humourless machine. But what the show is so good at is showing that, beneath any exterior, no matter how tough or spiky, there’s complexity and depth and tenderness.”

Indeed, the show is still a wholesome delight: reliably funny, big on cockle-warming, and this season with a great dollop of female empowerment thanks to its new storyline, in which Ted coaches Richmond’s women’s team. It is also a welcome break from the incessant violence against women on our screens, and indeed in all art forms. I mention last month’s revelation that nine out of 10 bestselling novels in the UK feature a murdered woman. “Yes!” shouts Reynolds, head in hands in exasperation.

“A big part of why I loved Ted Lasso so much was that it’s exactly the kind of TV I want to watch right now,” she says. “Personally, and maybe this is because of my own slightly nervous, anxious disposition …” a pause, “or maybe it’s because I’m just fucking exhausted, like so many women out there are just exhausted of ... yeah,” she trails off, rubbing her eyes wearily. “But I can’t watch things that are violent, and especially violent towards women. I just can’t,” she concludes.

“1536,” she adds, “is basically a play about how history is repeating itself [and asking] how far have we moved on from that time that a king [Henry VIII] decided to start changing the laws so he could kill his wives.” A gallows laugh. “Take us out of our huge dresses and put us in jeans, and you could have the same script, essentially.” She adds: “Ted Lasso is very different but its whole thing is about optimism and positivity and … communicating with each other. That’s the kind of telly I’m craving.”

Others who have been craving Ted will be pleased to see many of the original cast returning. In fact, outside of the footballers, Reynolds is the only new lead. How was her first day on set?

“I was so nervous. And they write as they go, so it wasn’t like we had 10 scripts in advance. By the time I started, I had read two,” she says. “They know where they would like to go but they’re also so open to collaboration and they write for the actors, so everything’s getting built as you’re going.”

A lot of her scenes were with “genius improvisers” Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt (the co-creator and writer who plays Coach Beard). “So much of the improv was just them being hilarious, and me trying not to laugh. The whole shoot felt like an exercise in ‘Don’t laugh. Just don’t laugh.’”

They also helped Reynolds find her footballing feet. “Like a lot of people, I definitely have gotten into women’s football in the last couple of years but I had to up the ante getting this [job].” Despite watching “more football than I’ve probably ever watched”, the match scenes proved tricky. “They filmed the coaches separately, so we’re not actually watching any football. The lads would improv and shout things out. I just was like ‘Er, kick! Go on, um, kick the ball!’ I had to constantly ask Brendan and Jason: ‘What’s a good football-coachy thing to say?’”

The release of Ted Lasso will no doubt catapult Reynolds to a new level of stardom. But despite being “obnoxiously sure of [herself]” at primary school, she has been dogged by imposter syndrome throughout her career. Surely it’s getting better with all her successes, I ask?

“To be honest, I think it’s maybe getting worse!” she laughs a ‘what you gonna do?’ laugh. “It gets worse every year. The way I’m dealing with it currently is to take every job as it comes, do my best with it, and then afterwards I don’t watch anything. I just think: ‘I’m just gonna keep going until they tell me I can’t.’”

Ted Lasso is on Apple TV from 5 August.