CHICAGO — Brendan Hunt is premiering a new autobiographical solo show, “The Movement You Need,” at the Steppenwolf Theatre, with preview performances beginning last week ahead of an April 26 opening. Hunt, 53, grew up in Chicago’s West Lakeview neighborhood and began his career in Chicago storefront theater, performing with such companies as City Lit and ComedySportz. He shot to fame with the success of “Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV comedy he co-wrote about an American coach with near-zero soccer knowledge working for an English football team. Hunt plays Coach Beard, sidekick to the titular character played by Jason Sudeikis.

We spoke over dinner at the Willow Room restaurant in Lincoln Park. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: You’ve been all over the local media these last several days. What is the most asked question?

A: What do you want people to leave “Ted Lasso” with? Everybody also wants to know about Season 4. All I can tell them is that it’s the can and coming out this summer.

Q: That is the final season?

A: I hope not. We’ll see. Want to know the most-asked mistake? “What was it like at Second City?” I was never at Second City.

Q: Take us through your life. I remember you here as a person on the comedic scene.

A: I did a lot of ComedySportz in the 1990s, as you know. I had a theater company called Wax Lips Theatre Company. We did a show called “Navy Pier” at Strawdog and Live Bait! I went to Amsterdam (to perform at the Boom Chicago! improv theater) in the February of 1999.

Q: How did Boom Chicago! find you?

A: They saw me at ComedySportz, which at that point was at the old Turnaround Theatre. The audition was at the Theatre Building.

Q: They knocked that down today.

A: Today? Wow. Anyway, I had just closed a City Lit show there. The poster was still outside. I wanted it more than anything. I was in the middle of getting separated; I’d gotten married right out of Illinois State, where I did not have a contiguous run, and I was dealing with that emotional wreckage. We were both too young. We are still friends now. It was not the right time. I had no intention of ever leaving Chicago ever. But the experience at Boom! had more in store for me than I intended, and I ended up being there for five years.

Q: You did not make tons of money there, I am guessing.

A: You had to have a side hustle at least in the first year. Tour boats for me. Ike Barinholtz was a busboy.

Q: Boom Chicago! had a Second City model, sort of?

A: Yes, sketch and improv, but with more games. And they prided themselves on being more rock ‘n’ roll. The tech director was not a theater guy. He was a rock guy. So I think we were the first comedy theater in the world to have its own laser. Lasers, it turns out, don’t make your show funnier. But they do induce an enormous water bill.

But the experience was incredibly impactful on me. Here I was, you know, Irish Catholic alcoholic mom, Vietnam vet dad, divorced when I was 2. I had been trying to get by, believing that was normal, without doing a full inventory of how that had affected me. I knew that I hated myself and that I probably shouldn’t. But I didn’t really see a way out of that. But then I went to Holland and learned the Dutch concept of gezellig.

Q: Gezellig?

A: It can mean coziness and a lot of other things. But the main thing it means is that if you are thinking about something hanging over you and that thinking about it won’t change it, then why are you thinking about it? I mean, I still needed a lot of therapy but being in Holland was extremely helpful for me. That is why I stayed for five years, even though there was a limited number of things you could do in Amsterdam when you didn’t really speak the language. Then I went to L.A. on a whim. I arrived in L.A. in the middle of the strike. I had to hang on for dear life: temping, house-sitting, sleeping in friends’ houses. It was a massive blow to my confidence. I try not to have regrets, but it is a bit of a regret that I did not come back to Chicago then.

Q: That was a very good time in Chicago comedy. You were still single?

A: I had relationships. But they were always modern and complicated.

Q: And then, eventually, you get “Ted Lasso.”

A: That took forever. I had done a part in “We’re the Millers.” Even when I was shooting it, I was thinking the scene was not important to the story. So I was not shocked when Jason called, weeks later, to say, bad news, we’ve cut your scene. But he also had good news, which was that there was this “soccer thing.” He’d been asked to do a commercial for NBC Sports’ Premier League coverage. This was 2013. I didn’t know it then, but that was when everything was changing. We did another one the next year. Jason knew he loved the Ted Lasso character after that second year, but we didn’t know if it was a show or a movie or what. But he, me and Joe Kelly wrote a pilot and we mapped out a season, and then I got my hopes up super-high, and then nothing happened for years. Jason was having kids. Joe was doing “How I Met Your Mother.” By late 2018, I had to say to myself, “Stop thinking about Ted Lasso.” It’s not going to happen. Forget about it. I even had lunch with a friend who did regional theater and decided there was nobility there. But then it happened.

Q: How quickly did it catch on?

A: When the first three episodes came out in August 2020, we’d been picked to write a Season 2 but not necessarily shoot a Season 2. Nobody had Apple TV back then, but the people who did have it were getting on Twitter and writing passionate things. It was clear something strange was happening.

Q: The Brits have embraced it. Just as well since you film there.

A: Not so much at first but they have now. I get recognized more in London than here. It has been as if that entire nation of Britain has been playing the Trent Crimm dynamic of trying to resist it, but then finding themselves enjoying it more than they wanted to.

Q: I felt in Season 1, like it was hard for you to handle the actual scenes of the game, if you’ll forgive me.

A: I am the soccer fan in the room. I think it is fair to say that the football in Season 1 is a little off, but in Season 2, we hired a dedicated football director and we were better able to work on the football and we got more angles and more things for directors to work with. We got really good. There are some great YouTube videos about how we do the football on “Ted Lasso.” Mostly about Season 3.

Q: The show has such heart. Famously so.

A: We try, we try. It’s not quite accurate when people talk about the show being super-positive. It’s not about positive stuff happening; it’s about how people react to real stuff happening. The positivity has no value unless it is in response to pain.

Q: Then you became a celebrity and people interrupt you in restaurants.

A: Ha. Our running joke in the cast is that no one has anywhere to hide. I am a dude with a beard. A lot of people would disguise themselves with a beard. Beard is literally my character’s name. Jason is 6′ 2.” Hannah (Waddingham) is Big Bird in Gucci wherever she goes. We have nowhere to go. We have to suck it up. Everyone means well.

Q: Now, there is this live show at Steppenwolf.

A: My son was born in January of 2021, at a hospital in London, because of work. We had just started Season 2 of “Ted Lasso,” but we’d gone early because my wife was pregnant and she needed to be able to fly. I had made a playlist that was on shuffle, and it so happened that our son was born during “Hey, Jude.”

I have a lifelong relationship with “Hey, Jude.” My mom was a huge Beatles fan and we had a complicated relationship but we always had the Beatles. Also, when I was little, my nickname was Na-Na because I couldn’t pronounce Brendan so when I heard “Hey Jude,” I thought it was about me. By the time my son was born, my mom had passed away. I started to think about how the Beatles had been in a lot of my life’s moments, I started to think there might be a show in this. COVID got in the way. But then, a year and a half later, I got to meet Paul McCartney.

Q: How?

A: We were working on Season 3, which was beset with some problems. So we were in a different part of London and Jason gets a text from the manager of the Foo Fighters about the Taylor Hawkins all-star memorial tribute show at Wembley, and he says that Paul McCartney is going to play, only no one knows this yet. So we walked over to watch Paul McCartney rehearse. I met Paul McCartney. So now my show had a frame.

Q: Must have been fun to meet him.

A: Meeting him was harrowing. My literal first memories of the Beatles were watching “Yellow Submarine” with my mom on the couch. I didn’t want to be the fan who tries to tell the Beatles part of their life story to Paul McCartney. For 60 years, he’s been hearing that. So I had all these things to say to him, and I couldn’t. So in the show, I tell the audience all the things I couldn’t tell Paul McCartney.

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“The Movement You Need: An Evening With Brendan Hunt” runs through May 10 at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.; 312-335-1650 and www.steppenwolf.org

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