When the affable football coach Ted Lasso travels to the United Kingdom to helm Richmond AFC, he meets the conniving Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift). Working as the quasi-assistant to team owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), Season 1 revealed that Higgins was scheming behind Rebecca's back with the team's old owner and her ex-husband, Rupert Mannion. However, Rebecca blackmails Higgins to help her end the football team's legacy. Just as Rebecca's outlook improves thanks to working with Ted, Higgins undergoes his own transformation for the better while retaining Higgins' iconically bumbling tendencies.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Swift teased the changes to Higgins that fans can expect in Season 2, shared what character elements he wanted to retain as Higgins became more of his own man, and spoke on the joys of getting to work beside Waddingham on the series.
In the first season, your character was kind of working cross-purposes and serving two different masters. In Season 2, he's full-on with Ted Lasso. How was it finding that?
Jeremy Swift: Yeah, he's straight into it, isn't he? He's straight into a kind of stable, managerial role and there's nothing blocking him from Rebecca. There are no stumbling blocks. He's been enabled by Rebecca via Ted by the end of the first season. He's the Higgins he always wanted to be in a way, this kind of elder of the club, among the male characters.
Of course, it is a comedy and there are dilemmas like, Where is his office? -- which could be a spinoff series! But he's in a better place because he's older. He's not going to yo-yo quite so much as some of the younger characters. He's domestically secure but there's still room for lots of silliness.
In a lot of this series, we see Higgins play off of Rebecca. How was it developing that dynamic with Hannah?
It's changed a little bit because the character was kind of wearing two hats. He's part of the Diamond Dogs in Season 2 and he's part of the brass, as well, with Rebecca and Keeley, making those overview decisions. There's more of a camaraderie of guys helping each other out with personal issues and that kind of stuff.
But working with Hannah in the first season was absolutely fantastic! We just got on with it and our scenes are just so delicious that we loved playing them. They're just enormous fun. I think we're both musical and there's a synergy between music and comedy, I think. And we got into the rhythm with each other on set. It was just delightful!
With Season 2 having that purer Higgins, the version of himself he always wanted to be, what did you want to bring to him in Season 2?
I wanted to keep some physical comedy. More of those tiny moments to break something open and do something. I wanted to keep that in there. I was able to do that a little bit.
What I've enjoyed doing with the character is being allowed to be a bit of a mentor because mentoring is a theme to the show, certainly in the first season -- enabling people in a good way is a good thing. Doing that as a kind of elder has been great and an attribute of the character that you wouldn't have quite foreseen if you only saw the first few episodes of the first season. You might've just thought he was a put-upon goofball. Having changed that up is great!
Season 2 of Ted Lasso premieres July 23 on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes debuting weekly.
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