Brett Goldstein: the writer who keeps outgrowing Roy Kent

Brett Goldstein

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 17, 1980 Sutton, London, England
Occupation	Actor, Writer, Producer
Known for	The Sheep Detectives, Thor: Love and Thunder, The Garfield Movie
Awards	2 Emmy · British Independent Film

Ask Brett Goldstein what he is, and the answer he reaches for is writer. Not comedian, not actor, not the one word the internet reliably fills in when his name comes up. He co-created Shrinking with Jason Segel and Bill Lawrence — three seasons in — wrote and starred in SuperBob and Office Romance, and serves as executive producer on Ted Lasso Season 4 while also writing some of its episodes. The acting, according to him, is what happens when you need someone to play a character you have already written, and no one else will do. That, at least, is the argument his career makes, even if Roy Kent’s cultural footprint makes it harder to hear.

He grew up in Sutton, on the south-facing edge of Greater London, in a Jewish family that had a brief entrepreneurial detour — his father’s strip club in Marbella became part of his stand-up mythology, and the title of his earliest Edinburgh show. He read Film Studies at the University of Warwick, then crossed the Atlantic to train at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. The city stuck long enough to shape his rhythm, but he came back, wrote plays, tried Edinburgh Fringe, and gradually concluded that comedy was a faster route to audiences than drama.

The British TV years were character-actor years: a recurring role in Derek, a run on Hoff the Record, appearances in smaller British comedies that gave him enough work to keep building, not enough to fix anyone’s expectations. SuperBob, which he wrote and starred in, was the first real signal of what he was after — a low-budget British superhero film set in Peckham, finding absurdist dignity in exactly the kind of story Hollywood would not produce. Adult Life Skills won him the British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actor. He launched his podcast Films to Be Buried With in 2018 — a long-form conversation series about which films guests would take into the afterlife — and built a listening audience before the television machine rediscovered him.

Ted Lasso began as a promotional character for NBC Sports, a comedy bit for American soccer broadcasts. Goldstein took the brief, created Roy Kent, and eventually found himself cast in the role after the project grew into a full Apple TV+ series. The character is a study in performed contempt masking almost unbearable feeling: the retired captain who doesn’t know what to do once the identity collapses. Two consecutive Emmy Awards followed, for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, and the acceptance speeches — delivered with characteristic profanity — became small viral moments of their own. In 2022, he appeared as Hercules in Thor: Love and Thunder, a mid-credits cameo that the internet processed with the same mild surprise as most of his pivots: how did he get there, and why does it work.

The interesting thing about the Roy Kent success is what it revealed about the way the industry works: you can spend years as a writer-producer building genuinely original material, and the thing that registers is the performance. Shrinking, which Goldstein co-created with Jason Segel and Bill Lawrence, is the better case for his range — a comedy about a therapist who abandons professional ethics and starts telling his clients what he actually thinks, with Harrison Ford as a grumpy cardiologist in one of the better late-career casting decisions in recent memory. Three seasons in, Shrinking has built its own audience independent of Ted Lasso‘s shadow. His role in it — Louis Wilson, the drunk driver who killed the protagonist’s wife, working toward something that is not quite redemption — resists the Roy Kent gravity: no expletives, no crowd-pleasing outbursts, no room for the performance to become a crowd-pleaser.

Office Romance, which Goldstein wrote with Joe Kelly and released on Netflix in June 2026, is a romantic comedy in the opposite direction — commercially accessible, unapologetically funny, and built around a dynamic with Jennifer Lopez that critics found odder and more appealing than the premise suggested. He also appeared in At the Sea, Kornél Mundruczó’s drama that competed at the Berlinale, where Amy Adams carries most of the weight and Goldstein plays a kite seller introduced and then deliberately suspended — a small part in a serious film, the kind of casting choice that says something about what he’s drawn to when he isn’t writing the scenes himself.

Born on 17 July 1980, he is 46. Ted Lasso Season 4 is currently in production. Goldstein is writing episodes again, which, depending on how you read his career, is either the job he keeps returning to or the one he never actually left.

His stand-up special The Second Best Night of Your Life, which premiered on HBO in April 2025, announced itself as exactly what it sounds like. The title is a running joke about his own public image — the man who played on Sesame Street’s set and will tell you, sincerely, that it was the best night of his life, and has let nothing since displace it. Season 4 is coming. There are more things after it. He keeps writing.