Award-winning actor, screenwriter and playwright Brendan Hunt joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about how his upbringing and “Hey Jude” inspired his new one-man stage production and much more on “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Hunt, best known for portraying Coach Beard on the Apple TV series “Ted Lasso” (on which he is also co-creator and writer), told Womack, “I literally don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about The Beatles.” Growing up in Chicago, he says his earliest memory was being three years old, his parents having just divorced, and wandering out of bed to find his mother alone watching “Yellow Submarine.” Even from that young age, Hunt says, “they drew me in. That’s basically been it for me from there.”
His Beatles journey took him through his mother’s “big record collection” and being exposed to “their psychedelic years way younger than I should have been,” and then discovering the “mop-top” years later through a friend’s cassette tape and the “Red” and “Blue” compilation albums. But “Hey Jude” was the song that Hunt said he “leaned on” his whole life – and from where he took the name for his stage show, “The Movement You Need,” currently playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre in his hometown of Chicago, in what he believes is a “full circle” moment.
He explained that the show is based on the fact that he and his mother “had a complicated relationship, but we had The Beatles. That was our sports – like how dads and sons who can’t talk about their feelings talk about March Madness, we talked about The Beatles . . . that’s the power of a piece of art that is based in an emotional truth.”
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Hunt had already started work on the play when, while filming Season 3 of “Ted Lasso” in London, he got an opportunity for the chance meeting of a lifetime. “There were rehearsals for the Taylor Hawkins tribute show at Wembley, about 15 minutes away from where we were, and there was supposed to be a surprise act.” The act turned out to be none other than Paul McCartney, who had gotten to know Jason Sudeikis from “Saturday Night Live” and asked if the “ Ted Lasso” star would want to come by and bring his friends.
“In this moment, I know that I have so much to say to Paul McCartney,” Hunt explained to Womack, but he didn’t want to be one more person saddling the Beatle with tales of what all of his songs meant to him. “So instead, I say it all in my show. The audience gets to hear every night what I would have told Paul McCartney. It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done.”
Listen to the entire conversation with Brendan Hunt on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you’re listening. “Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin and the bestselling books “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles” and “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” His latest book is the authorized biography of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, “Living the Beatles Legend,” out now.
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