The Season 2 finale of “Ted Lasso” features a heel turn for the ages. Nate (Nick Mohammed), an assistant football coach for Richmond who has gradually morphed from affable lad to embittered schemer, tears into the relentlessly optimistic coach Lasso (Jason Sudeikis). Ted once lavished Nate with attention, but his mind has since wandered to other matters. Nate feels betrayed, and as he confronts Ted in his office and spews bile at his former mentor, we feel every drop.
It’s a stunning reversal, and Mohammed, an Emmy nominee for supporting actor in a comedy for the second consecutive year, sells the pathos with verve.
“In Season 1, Nick brought the sweetness and vulnerability to the character,” says Brett Goldstein, Mohammed’s longtime friend and fellow “Ted Lasso” player, who is nominated in the same Emmy category. “In Season 2, he wasn’t afraid to show the ugly side of his emotional damage and ruthless ambition. Throughout it all, he was still heartbreaking. The final scene with Ted in his office, we were all in tears at the monitor.”
In a series known for sharp writing and committed performances, Mohammed took advantage of the most dynamic character arc. Nate doesn’t just start off as a good guy; he’s quiet and passive, perhaps kind to a fault. He’s a threat to no one. In hindsight, by the time he flips, he was a ticking time bomb.
“The writers are so clever,” Mohammed said in a video call from Cornwall, in southwestern England, where he was on holiday with his family. “They planted all those seeds in Season 1 and then managed to just drip-feed all these toxic elements in Season 2. Everyone rooted for Nate in Season 1, and that was all deliberate, so that the fall from grace was an even bigger gut punch. They laid all these foundations and then just blasted them away.”
In conversation and by reputation, Mohammed, 41, is a lot closer to Good Nate than Bad Nate. Quick, cheerful, generous with praise, he exudes gratitude for where “Ted Lasso” has put him. He’s long been a fixture on the U.K. comedy scene, in live performance and on TV panel shows, as himself and as his most popular creation, an opinionated know-it-all named Mr. Swallow. Now, however, he gets spotted. He went to a hot-air balloon festival in Albuquerque, where everyone wanted to talk about Nate. Closer to home, he took his family to a middle-of-nowhere ruins, Fountains Abbey, where the few strangers there addressed him by his TV name: “Oh, hey, Nate. How are you? You all right?” Mohammed, his wife and two children actually live in Richmond, the city where the show’s football club is based; when he goes out jogging, passersby assume he’s trying to be spotted.
He takes his intercontinental fame in stride, knowing it springs from his work in a high-quality series. Mohammed originally read for the part of Higgins, Richmond’s do-everything director of football operations. That role went to Jeremy Swift. The show’s creators then offered him Nate and let him know the character would undergo some juicy changes. He jumped, though he knew Nate’s transformation would be a test.
“It was challenging, because my comfort area, if I have a comfort area, is doing awkward, geeky, goofy comedy,” Mohammed says. “So there was less opportunity for that as we progressed into Season 2, because it just became a lot darker, and more dramatic, and more emotional.”
You can find Mohammed in his comfort zone all over YouTube, where Mr. Swallow is quite popular. A nasal-voiced, fast-talking character of great ambition and little competence, Swallow is based on a teacher Mohammed used to imitate in high school. “She basically used the classroom and her role as a teacher as a way of spouting these incredible views about all sorts of things and didn’t really ever teach us anything,” Mohammed says. “She’d just have a go at us and talk about whatever was on her mind.”
Mr. Swallow always has big plans, such as a musical biopic of Houdini. This Christmas, Mohammed plans to have him prepare a production of “A Christmas Carol,” except he hasn’t procured the rights. “He’s basically always trying to do something that he’s not really qualified to do,” Mohammed says. “He’s like my alter ego, my baby, really. He allows me to say things I would probably never say as myself but I get away with it through the guise of being in character.”
Mr. Swallow actually has something in common with “Ted Lasso”: optimism. Nate may have taken a dark turn, and the series has managed to peel back its layers of bonhomie to reveal some more complicated ideas, but it was the sense of hope that originally pulled Mohammed in, much as it struck a nerve with viewers.
“When I got sent the scripts, it felt like it was bucking the trend in that, thematically, it was more hopeful and optimistic than a lot of other comedies. It just seemed to resonate with people at a time when they really needed it. It’s something that I think I’ll forever be proud of.”
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