Brendan Hunt is probably best known for not only starring as the monosyllabic Coach Beard in Ted Lasso, but also for being one of the show’s co-creators. You might think his Instagram would be filled with promo for the new season of Lasso, but instead he spent the beginning of the summer promoting Elvis Prestello’s second-ever concert at the Troubadour on June 11. But who is Elvis Prestello?
In 2006, Hunt was talking to fellow Ted Lasso co-creator Joe Kelly about an idea to dress up for Halloween as an Elvis Presley impersonator performing Elvis Costello songs. Kelly liked the idea enough to give Hunt a handmade Elvis (Presley) costume that his mom had made for him in high school. It wasn’t a huge hit at Halloween parties, but it still struck a chord with the comedian. That little seed led to Elvis Prestello, an act where Hunt performs with the costuming and tenor of a Presley impersonator, but only does Costello covers. Last year, Prestello made his Troubadour debut with a show that featured a series of inside jokes for Presley and Costello fans alike—such as being destroyed by Colonel Alison Parker—as well as dramatic moments of collapsing and being brought back to life, or shaving his beard on stage.
At close to midnight in London, after a long day of working on Ted Lasso’s fourth season, Hunt hopped on a call with me to talk about the creation of Prestello and his relationship as a performer to both music and paying tribute to classic moments in pop culture.
According to Elvis Prestello’s social media, the earliest documented shows were in 2010. Did you start performing as Prestello earlier than that?
Earlier than that. After the Halloween costume in 2006, I was in Amsterdam for the final time of living there. On my way out the door, I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna try this fucking Elvis Prestello thing as a show.” I rented an Elvis costume—having not brought the gifted costume with me—got some friends together who were musicians, and went for it at this dive bar in the red-light district. I’d say the show didn’t go great. One of our main discoveries was finding out that Elvis Costello’s songs are hard. There’s not a single one that’s a normal four-by-four, verse-chorus-verse situation. They’ve all got something complicated or quirky about them, even the ones that sound straightforward. But there were two or three moments that went well enough that I was like, “Yeah, this is worth trying to do.” And then I think it was the fall of ’08 or early ’09 that I got together with some guys, and I’ve been doing it with them pretty much ever since.
Can you talk about your band members and how they got involved in the project?
I knew Ed Goodman, our guitarist, in roughly 1997; I met him the exact moment I met Jason Sudeikis, because they’d both driven up from Kansas City together to do an improv show with our company, ComedySportz. Michael Cassady, on keys—I met him when I was performing with Boom Chicago at the Edinburgh Festival. He just came up and introduced himself and said he liked the show, and I thought he had a cool energy and appeared to be a good dude. Jeffrey Allen Brown, our drummer—he’s the only one not an improviser, but I met him through improv people. When I got to know him, I was like, “Oh, he’s from Evanston.” I was born in Evanston. Joel Spence and I met through another actor friend, because Joel is one of the few Americans I’ve met in LA who’s nearly as big a soccer fan as I am. I was like, “Here’s a band of dudes who are actors—I might be setting myself up to fail again, but at least I like hanging out with these guys.”
And it turns out these motherfuckers can play—legit play. Sometimes you need to wear a shirt, and you just reach for the shirt that’s closest to the bed because it’s time to wake up. I reached for the musicians who were closest to the bed because they were friends of mine who were secretly musicians. But as it turns out, that shirt was my exact right color and fit.
“I was like, ‘Here’s a band of dudes who are actors—I might be setting myself up to fail again, but at least I like hanging out with these guys.’”
Speaking of finding the right fit, you have all these weird little bits and interstitial performative aspects. Are there any certain gags that you thought would hit well that didn’t?
From the beginning, it was clear: I have to cling to Elvis Costello’s various ethos and do them in an Elvis Presley style—hates Thatcher, loves his mama, etc. But in terms of a joke that rarely lands, but I do it every time anyway? After “Shipbuilding,” which is about the Falklands conflict, primarily, and which was co-written by Robert Wyatt, I always say, having not mentioned it at all to this point, “Man, we gotta get out of them Falklands.” And there’ll be, like, three to four white dudes of a certain age who’ll be like, “Yeah!” I can’t quit that joke.
You’re inspired a lot by music in all of the work that you do. I’d love you to talk more about your one-man show, The Movement You Need.
A few years ago I met Paul McCartney, and it was incredibly terrifying because I’m probably a Beatle fan more than I am anything else. My mom largely raised me and my sister by herself until my stepdad came along. I think she was rather overwhelmed with the task of parenting, and really all she had to impart to us, given her demons—she was an alcoholic—was The Beatles. Consciously or not, she very much opened our hearts to The Beatles. And I realized at some point that for all the years of complication that our relationship would contain, The Beatles was the constant, one avenue of concord and agreement and peace. Almost like a dad and his son stereotypically have baseball, me and mom had The Beatles. Not so much conversations about it, just a mutual thing that we loved.
There’s a lot of things in my life that have happened with a Beatle song attached to it, not least being this one day I won tickets to see Paul play at Pappy & Harriet’s in 2016. I won them on NPR, drove to Joshua Tree that night, and then as I’m getting off the freeway, I find out that my mom has fallen ill. And I sit there, white-knuckling through this concert, and 20 minutes after it’s over, find out that she has passed. My first memory is The Beatles, because my mom was watching Yellow Submarine one night and she sat me down with her to watch it, and then she died the night of a Paul McCartney show. So I have this solo show about that and use meeting Paul as a framing device.
My dad, who was not around as much, is still probably the best guitar player I’ve ever heard in my life. He was an incredible folk player, primarily, but I’ve never heard a finger-picker especially better than him. And his demons, I think, prevented him from ever getting any kind of prominence despite his formidable skill. When I was a kid and he would come over, he’d play “Johnny B. Goode” or “Dixie Chicken” for me and my sister and we’d just fawn over it, not asking questions like, “Why is this guy only here for like a couple of weekends out of the year? We don’t have to worry about that. Look at the way he plays ‘Johnny B. Goode.’” I see him at this show at Weeds 20 years later, he’d arranged Scott Joplin’s piano masterpiece “Maple Leaf Rag” for acoustic guitar. The motherfucker is playing Joplin on acoustic guitar. I don’t know what that means for my relationship to music, but I’ve tried to play guitar and I can’t get anywhere near what he could do. I think he’s just got bigger hands than me and a real knack for practicing, which has always sort of eluded me.
Do you have any involvement with the music selection on Ted Lasso?
Jason’s the final arbiter, and we have this fantastic music supervisor, Tony Von Pervieux, and Christa Miller has been involved, as well. It’s a real jukebox-by-committee. The directors will often have their say—or the writers—but I’m one of the last gatekeepers before things get decided, and I’ve been able to pitch a few things that got in. Episode 102 ends with [Dave Clark Five’s] “Glad All Over,” which just feels right in the moment, but also happens to be the victory song of Crystal Palace, who beat Richmond in that episode.
“For years, I’ve wondered: What exactly happens when you’re a tribute act? Do you get to a certain point and then finally you get a cease and desist? And is Elvis [Costello] the type of guy who would do that?”
You were telling me something very special happened after your Troubadour show.
So for years, I’ve wondered: What exactly happens when you’re a tribute act? Do you get to a certain point and then finally you get a cease and desist? And is Elvis [Costello] the type of guy who would do that? One of our champions has been Jason Sudeikis, who’s loved the whole bit from very early on, and I knew that he’d said once, “Hey, I just had dinner with Elvis Costello’s manager, but we’re just meeting each other so it probably wasn’t time yet, so I didn’t tell him.”
Now that Ted Lasso has come out, I find myself meeting a lot of people who I wouldn’t expect to meet, and I started to feel like, “Oh shit, I might actually meet Elvis one day, I hope it’s not awkward because, you know, he’s famously awesome, but also famously can get real mad if he’s got a reason to be mad. And does a tribute act count as a reason to be mad?” So we play the Troubadour on a Tuesday and in a fluke of scheduling, Elvis was coming to town that weekend. We’d never had one of our shows that close to one of his. Jason set it up to take the whole band to go see Elvis, and then he showed me a text from Elvis’s road manager that says, “Hey, tell the coach if Elvis has laryngitis or anything, he’s on deck.”
“Elvis motherfucking Costello comes out wearing a full Adidas tracksuit and one of those Goorin Bros. hats with an animal on it. This one was a GOAT, and it says 'GOAT,' which is fucking perfect. And he’s got a huge smile, shaking all of our hands.”
I go to see the show on that Sunday and he fucking kills. He’s always amazing. And soon afterward, we’re led to the bowels of the Orpheum to this reception area, and the person leading us says, “Just come through here because Elvis, I think he wants to meet you right away.” Like, “What the fuck is happening?” Now I got to get my shit together. So we’re standing outside a doorway and Elvis motherfucking Costello, at the age of seventy-something, comes out wearing a full Adidas tracksuit and one of those Goorin Bros. hats with an animal on it. This one was a GOAT, and it says “GOAT,” which is fucking perfect. And he’s got a huge smile, shaking all of our hands. We find out afterward that apparently they almost came to the show on Tuesday. The whole band almost came to the show, but their rehearsal went long. But they knew about it and didn’t have negative feelings about it.
But he shakes everyone’s hand and then he says to me, “Hold on, I got something for you.” And my first thought was, “What is it, a writ?” And he comes back: He’s printed two of the posters that the Troubadour just posted online. So he had to make it himself. And he was like, “I’m going to sign one of these for you and you’re gonna sign one of these for me.” FL
