Brett Goldstein Reveals How His Role In Bill Lawrence-Donald Faison Pilot 'Space Turk' (?!) Led To Ted Lasso
Before he landed his breakout role as gruff footballer Roy Kent on Apple TV+'s Ted Lasso, future two-time Emmy winner Brett Goldstein was already in Bill Lawrence's orbit: In 2017, the Scrubs mastermind cast the British comedian opposite Donald Faison in Spaced Out, an NBC workplace sitcom that never saw the light of day.
On Saturday, I had the honor of moderating the Bill Lawrence & Friends panel at ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas — a panel that also featured Zach Braff (Scrubs), Josh Hopkins (Cougar Town), Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso) and Charly Clive (who stars opposite Dunster and Steve Carell in Lawrence's forthcoming HBO show) — and I asked Goldstein what he remembered about his first collaboration with Lawrence.
"It was my second pilot season in L.A.," Goldstein recalled. "I'd gone and done a pilot for HBO the year before that was really good but didn't get picked up, and then I came back and I auditioned for Bill's new show. I loved Bill because of Scrubs... and I was so excited that it had Donald in it."
Spaced Out — which was written by Undateable creator Adam Sztykiel, and counted Lawrence as an EP — starred Matt Shively (The Real O'Neals, Lopez vs. Lopez) as a working-class genius who struggled to fit in with a team of scientists (including Goldstein, Faison, Miranda Cosgrove, Christine Woods and Ken Kirby) whose job involved building a rocket to Mars.
"It was basically Scrubs set in a rocket factory. We called it 'Space Turk,'" Goldstein told the audience, at which point Lawrence interjected and exclaimed, "It was not called 'Space Turk.'" But that was besides the point: "The thing that's awful about making TV is that we all felt on set that this [pilot was] really special, this is a thing," Goldstein said. "So much so that when Bill's producing partner Jeff Ingold said goodbye to me — because you do the pilot and then you start [shooting the rest of] the season in August — he said to me, 'See you in August!' And so I started packing up my house, I sold my place [in England], and then a month later, it's not happening, and I was, like, 'Where do I live?!'"
Lawrence ultimately kept in touch with Goldstein — and a couple of years later, he presented him with another opportunity for the two of them to work together: "He called me completely out of the blue and said, 'I'm going to do this football show. You want to come and write on it?' And I said no. I said, 'I've got a big stand-up show booked.' He said, 'It starts next week,' and I was, like, 'But I've got these stand-up shows.'"
Shortly thereafter, Goldstein told his friend (and fellow stand-up comedian) Nish Kumar that Lawrence offered him a writing gig, and Kumar insisted that Goldstein "cancel the f–king show!" But his determination to honor his stand-up dates wasn't the only reason he initially declined.
"What it was was that I had developed this show Soulmates [for AMC]," Goldstein explained. And almost as soon as he gave in and agreed to write on Ted Lasso, "Soulmates got picked up, and I was, like, 'F–k!'"
The next several months were particularly busy for Goldstein. "He was running Soulmates and we hired him as a writer [on Ted Lasso]," Lawrence told me. At the time, "he didn't know he was also going to be Roy Kent, but that was all Brett. We were writing the part, he filmed an audition on his own, and he sent it to all of us, and he just absolutely killed it."
And the rest, as they say, is history.