As seen in this week’s episode of ‘Ted Lasso’
How Ann Brady Gorran and Kyle Siemers, childhood friends from Lafayette’s north end, wound up in the latest episode of ‘Ted Lasso’
Kyle Siemers turned away from the latest episode of “Ted Lasso,” streaming Wednesday evening on a TV mounted between replica port-a-pot entrances to the men’s and women’s restrooms at D.T. Kirby’s in downtown Lafayette, and caught the attention of Ann Brady Gorran, sitting at a nearby table packed with family, wearing a matching, red-and-blue AFC Richmond jersey.
“I’m nervous,” Siemers said, smiling across the room.
Gorran and Siemers had seen it the night before, this moment measured in seconds that Siemers said boiled down to: “If you turn your head at the wrong time, you’re going to miss it.”
But on Monday night, surrounded by dozens of North End family members seeing Season 3, Episode 10, for the first time, Siemers confessed to nerves about again seeing himself and Gorran pop up as extras – she as a receptionist, him as a scout – in a scene that the friends since first grade at St. Lawrence School had kept under wraps since last summer.
That was until family and friends, applauding at glimpses of the pair, shouted, “Again!” They rewound the 28-minute mark three times before moving on with the rest of the episode on Apple TV+. Nerves aside, Siemers said, things turned out even better than anyone thought they would.
“This has just been an incredible experience,” Gorran said.
Things started in June 2022 in Kansas City, during Big Slick, an annual, celebrity-driven fundraising weekend for the Cancer Center at Children’s Mercy hospital. (Big Slick raised $3.5 million in 2022.)
During the auction, actor Jason Sudeikis, the lead in “Ted Lasso,” offered a trip to England and the chance to be extras in an episode during Season 3 of the Emmy-winning comedy based on a fictional English football club. Gorran’s husband, Scott, had a winning bid.
Gorran said her husband wasn’t able to go. Instead, she invited Siemers – a fellow Central Catholic grad, longtime friend and fan of the show – to go along for the four-day stay in August 2022.
“I kept my expectations kind of low, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen once we got there,” Gorran said.
Siemers said they weren’t sure their scenes would air until the episode came out this week. (Their acting careers had been nonexistent up until that point. “You know how in ‘Love Actually,’ there’s the Nativity play with the ‘first lobster?’” Siemers said. “I never even was the ‘second lobster’ in the Nativity play.”)
Gorran said they spent about three hours on the set, between makeup, wardrobe and filming. They don’t have speaking parts. But the brief scenes play out as more than the “faces in the crowd at a match” Siemers assumed would be lined up for them.
In the scene, AFC Richmond’s Roy Kent (played by Brett Goldstein), typically wearing charcoal or black, comes to the team’s offices in a tie-dye shirt his niece, Phoebe, gave him. With Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand” as the soundtrack, Kent gathers dumbfounded stares as he walks in the door and through the room – including from Gorran, on the phone at a receptionist’s desk, and Siemers, at a doorway dressed as a scout.
It looked a bit like this …
“I have to give them props that they were able to fit us so seamlessly into that scene,” Siemers said. “Like we were supposed to be there, part of the story. Even if it was only for like three seconds.”
Gorran said that after shooting their scenes, “that’s when the trip got good.”
They said Sudeikis took them on an extended tour of the studio. They met him and others from the show in a suite at Emirates Stadium for an Arsenal-Fulham match. (Arsenal came back from down 1-nil to win the Premier League match, 2-1.) They wound up with Sudeikis at Highbury Library, a bar near the stadium, for drinks afterward. And they made time for sightseeing on their own in the days that followed.
“It was the full experience, not like they were trying to shoo us out as soon as we were done,” Siemers said.
And not like they were going to be on the cutting room floor. In the rear space at D.T. Kirby’s Wednesday night, family kept rewinding the proof, cheering each time.
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