When it was announced that Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought a struggling Welsh football called Wrexham AFC in early 2021, much of the world went "Huh?"
A year later, the journey of two Americans trying to figure out what football really meant was captured in the FX series Welcome to Wrexham, which brought the heart and soul of small town camaraderie and an underdog story to acclaim and incredible popularity.
The series is now nominated for six Primetime Emmy Awards, with a well-deserved nod for its editing team, Curtis McConnell, Michael Anthony Brown, Charles Little II, ACE, and Mohammed El Manasterly.
The four sit down with HELLO! to share some insight into the making of the show and crafting its mockumentary-like style, a "Rocky meets Modern Family," if you will.
"Some of the humor that comes out of it is because of the passion," Michael explains. "It's like the guy running around [in the stadium] in the Deadpool suit in a random frame. It just creates this natural visual comedy," with the group echoing a desire of "getting out of the way" to let the unique characters of Wrexham speak for themselves.
The four also bring diverse perspectives, having joined at different times in the journey. But also through their backgrounds in life (for instance, Curtis is South African and Mohammed Egyptian) and work (Curtis' documentary work, Michael's adventure doc credits, Charles' with Fox's 9-1-1, Mohammed's Emmy-winning work on The Square).
Mohammed credited their different perspectives to allowing the humor to flow, as he adds: "You perceive jokes differently. Some people see a joke as offensive, and it's not offensive to me, sometimes it's funny.
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"I always used to get into these debates of whether this is going to fly or this is offensive or what it is. And I think it was great having these different minds and different cultural perspectives to weigh in on these things."
Their goal remained, however, telling the story of a town and its cherished team, Rob and Ryan's mission from the start, which came through in the passion of everyone involved.
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"You can tell that everybody had so much pride in what they were doing, and we wanted it to be as good as it could be," Curtis gushed. "Some of it was our sense of responsibility that we had to the town of Wrexham. We wanted to make the people of Wrexham proud."
And yes, they've seen Ted Lasso, and they love it. Charles concurs with: "I think it's cool to know that there are two very high profile and very well received series, one scripted one non-scripted, just on the sport of football/soccer, bringing that sport a little bit more to the forefront.
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"We've been trying to do that now for a really, really long time. And these two series, I think they both play into that as well," he adds, recommending Ted Lasso viewers check out the real deal with Welcome to Wrexham, and vice versa.
While they've all caught some games, not all of them have been to Wrexham yet. "I feel like I've been to Wrexham, seeing so much of the footage and the B-roll," Michael said.
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Members of the group eventually managed to catch the LA Galaxy II vs Wrexham AFC game on July 22, (Wrexham won 4-0), and finally live out the passion they saw on-screen.
Charles added: "We're doing Wrexham chants and singing, just expecting for 20,000 people to be there. They weren't, but we were in our corner. It was full on Wrexham Reds." They even got the chance to meet one of the show's biggest stars – Waynes Jones, the owner of The Turf Hotel, the local Wrexham haunt frequented by its players and townsfolk.
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"Being able to hang out with Wayne Jones and have a beer and wearing Wrexham T-shirts, that was about as close to being there as I could get."
FX's Welcome to Wrexham returns with season two on September 12 at 10pm ET/PT, streaming next day on Hulu. (Streaming from 13 September on Disney+ in the UK.)
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