When Roy returns home from coaching his girls soccer team, he walks into the bedroom to find Keeley wearing headphones, phone in hand, and…what’s the most delicate way to put this? Keeley is: checking the undercarriage, dialing the rotary phone, taking a self-guided tour, engaging in the queen’s gambit … you know: massurbatin’.
While a lesser show would turn this into a punchline surrounding embarrassment, this episode immediately turns it on its head. Though Roy came across Keeley in a vulnerable situation, it’s not her vulnerability that Ted Lasso is concerned with: it’s Roy’s. It turns out that Keeley’s wank material had been Roy’s tear-filled retirement press conference, one of the only times that Roy has ever been outwardly emotional in his life.
“I love that scene,” Juno Temple tells Den of Geek. “It covers so much ground. It brings a comedy element and then a kind of seduction moment. Then a moment being like, ‘You know what? Being a man that’s as sexy as you are and being vulnerable and owning that is such a turn on.’ It literally has so many things in one scene. It’s a microuniverse. I loved it.”
According to Temple’s scene partner Goldstein, that moment is a highlight of the early season and was an unusually long undertaking, making up around five pages of the episode two script.
“It was like doing a mini play, that scene. There’s lots of levels going on in it,” he says. “We loved doing it. I just think the moment of him catching her is really unusual, I don’t think you see a lot of that. It’s also funny, sexy, and all this stuff.”
The key to it all, however, is what comes after. While Roy is initially horrified at the prospect of Keeley being turned on by him being “pathetic”, he comes to understand that she’s right…as she usually is. At Keeley’s urging, Roy gets back on the football horse and serves as a pundit on “Soccer Saturday” alongside Jeff Stelling and Chris Kamara.