Since his breakout role in the hit series Ted Lasso, Brixton boy Toheeb Jimoh has been nominated for an Emmy – and now Hollywood is calling. He talks to Tim Lewis about staying grounded, and how he’s finding his way
If early Lockdown One was dominated, in televisual terms, by Netflix’s weird and amoral documentary Tiger King, then the middle phase belonged to Ted Lasso. When its first episode dropped on Apple TV+ in August 2020, the premise felt familiar and unchallenging. It was a comedy – even sillier, a sports comedy – about an American coach played by the always-likable Jason Sudeikis, who is parachuted in to save a struggling English Premier League football team, AFC Richmond. Cue lots of fish-out-of-water gags, soccer-football misunderstandings and a narrative arc that ultimately sees the perennial underdogs bite back.
Ted Lasso was all that, but it emerged that it was a lot more, too. Much like Lasso himself, the show won over doubters with waves of relentless positivity and an underlying message that kindness prevails. “It tricks you with the whole sports comedy part of it, right?” says Toheeb Jimoh, who plays AFC Richmond linchpin Sam Obisanya. “It becomes a way to Trojan horse these really interesting characters and truths about us through the guise of, ‘Oh, it’s just this zany comedy about football and Americans and British people.’ And you can’t look past the fact that we were all locked at home, no one could see their parents or hug each other. It came at a really important time for…” he stops and laughs: “the world! But we couldn’t have known that when we were making it. There was just some universe magic dust sprinkled over it.”
