Diehard college football fans Glen Powell and Michael Waldron are going to ask you what college football team you root for if you talk to them about their new show, “Chad Powers.” There’s a decent chance they’d ask you even if you didn’t bring up the sport at all.
“Chad Powers,” a new Hulu comedy, follows Powell as Russ Holliday, a troubled former college football star, eight years after he makes a fatal mistake on the field: celebrating a touchdown before reaching the end zone, leading to a turnover and eventual loss in the Rose Bowl. Russ finds a second wind when he tries out for a college football team as a walk-on quarterback, wearing heavy prosthetics and acting under the guise of a fabricated identity: Chad Powers. He gets the idea after seeing a billboard for “Mrs. Doubtfire” outside the Fox Studios lot and steals facial prosthetics from his father, who happens to be an Oscar-winning makeup artist.
And he relives his glory days, this time as the starting quarterback for the fictional South Georgia Catfish.
If that premise sounds familiar, it’s because the series is based on a viral sketch featuring former NFL all-star Eli Manning, who goes undercover for walk-on quarterback tryouts at Penn State. In the clip, he dons prosthetics, a wig, altered voice and bizarre personality to pull off the hijinks. Chad Powers is born. The sketch was part of “Eli’s Places,” an ESPN+ series that was produced by NFL Films and Omaha Productions, the Manning brothers’ production company.
Powell and Waldron knew they wanted to take a stab at turning Manning’s sketch into a scripted series when Omaha Productions began exploring adaption options. But they didn’t want to just make a run-of-the-mill sports show. They set out to make the “greatest football experience, whether in movies or TV shows, that people have ever seen,” in its authenticity and heart, said Powell over Zoom (his screen name was “Glenjamin Button”).
“We want college football fans to see storylines and personalities and people that they are watching every Saturday,” Powell said. “This is not coming from our own imagination. It’s coming from our own fandom.”
Powell, who’s been working at a breakneck pace since his starring role in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” co-created and co-wrote the series with Waldron, who created the Marvel television series “Loki” and the short-lived but critically acclaimed “Heels.” Producers from both Omaha Productions — including Eli and Peyton Manning — and ESPN also worked on the series.
The first two episodes of “Chad Powers” were released Tuesday on Hulu, and new episodes drop weekly through Oct. 28. Powell and Waldron spoke on Monday about the development of the series, working with the Manning brothers, the “Hawk Tuah Girl” cameo and their devotion to getting the show right for college football fans like themselves.
Just don’t ask Waldron about his Georgia Bulldogs’ recent loss to Alabama’s Crimson Tide. Powell, a steadfast Texas Longhorn fan, teased him: “The fact that Alabama beat you guys at home before Texas could beat you guys at home just really bummed me out.” This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The “Mrs. Doubtfire” concept seems like a natural place to go from Eli’s take on Chad Powers, but how did you arrive at the idea of the man behind Chad being a “canceled” player?
Powell: One of the things that Waldron and I first talked about in terms of what the DNA of a great sports story is [that] it’s redemptive. It’s an underdog story. One thing that is part of the water supply in our day and age is no second chances. Now, [if] you sort of mess up in front of the world, it’s very often that we sort of bury those people quickly and aggressively. We just loved the idea that this face represented a fresh start for someone — a guy who had all the talent, who spent his entire life and gave everything he had to a game, but his face was the thing preventing him from getting back on that field. His face and his history.
Chad represents a fresh start. He represents the idealism of a walk-on, which is a fresh face coming out and being the heartbeat of a team. But if you discovered that the heartbeat of a team, that fresh face, was actually loaded down with toxic history, it changes it completely. And for me, as an actor, the duality of those two characters becomes much more interesting when you can cast those personalities as far away from each other as possible.
You’re both huge college football fans. What was it like to shoot in these massive stadiums with roaring crowds? Especially for you, Michael, to be in Sanford Stadium?
Waldron: Dream come true. We shot our team’s home stadium, the Catfish home stadium, at what was actually the old Turner Field in Atlanta, which is now Center Parc Stadium where Georgia State plays football, but that’s where I grew up going to baseball games in Atlanta. I would be in those stands being able to point out where I used to go with my dad as a little kid and watch the Braves teams in the ‘90s. And to shoot on the field at Sanford Stadium in a game atmosphere at halftime with all those fans booing Glen and booing our team was exhilarating.
Powell: We asked them to boo, by the way. We put it on the jumbotron.
Waldron: Very important. They would have cheered. But no, that was absolutely exhilarating and a career highlight for sure.
Powell: I also represent Texas so much that I’m just glad we asked them to boo so they didn’t boo naturally.
The opponents that the Catfish play are all real college teams. Was creating this fictional school, a way to get this joke in that Chad Powers is a catfish?
Waldron: We always wanted real schools to be the teams that they were playing, just to ground our show and the world in authenticity, the real world of college football. I think that’s what fans want to see. I want to see our team playing Ole Miss, Tennessee, Georgia. But we also always wanted a fictional school for our team so we could have bad behavior, comedy and all the crazy stuff you want in conflict that you need to happen in a TV show without worrying about clearances from another school.
One of the most fun parts was building our own big Southern college football program with 100 years of history, and developing the color scheme, the logo, the secondary logos, the retro logos and all of that stuff. The mascot. That’s one of the coolest things I think I’ve gotten to do.
[The catfish joke], that’s just a nice bonus. I think when we came up with it, we were just like, “They’re a southern team. Catfish feels like they’d be an SEC team.” And then we were then we were like, “Oh! We’re gonna seem like geniuses.”
As someone who lives in L.A., I found Russ’ personality in the first episode captured the ultimate L.A. douchebag — he drives a Cybertruck, he’s got Crypto buddies, he goes out with the “dopest people,” one of them being Haliey Welch [better known as “Hawk Tuah Girl”] in a hilarious cameo. How did you craft that image of Russ’ life before Chad — and what was it like getting Haliey on board?
Powell: One of the things that I just really liked is the first line back after the Rose Bowl [scene] is, “That’s why the Rose Bowl was the best thing that ever happened to me.” It’s one of my favorite parts of our story because it shows there’s a man in denial, right? There’s a man that’s not dealing with the thing that is really plaguing his heart. He’s trying to feel like he’s purposefully driving away from the football field in a Cybertruck, but all he wants to do is get back on that field.
That lack of accountability, that lack of vulnerability, that denial is something we all have seen when someone’s going through something really painful. We were just trying to make sure it was the most fun version of it. And you can see, especially with sort of the “Aw, shucks” mentality of who Chad is, I think it was like, “Let’s really live in a guy that we all know kind of sucks so that we can see that guy under the mask and have fun knowing that that person is existing under this character.” The fact that there’s two personalities coexisting is what makes that whole thing really sing.
Waldron: And just to speak to why he’s a douchebag — because it’s funny. We know that guy, that guy’s all over the internet and the show’s not trying to ignore that that guy exists, and what I’m taken by is the notion of, “Can that guy, by pretending to be a good teammate, can he become a good dude?”
And then as far as Haliey, we were just thinking about who is someone else who was defined by a single viral moment and now lives in the shadow of that? And of course, she’s a great contemporary version of that. We just reached out and she was incredibly game. I don’t think she acted before, and she showed up and was great, was so funny. It was fun to work with her. I think we were all a little starstruck.
The first episode also gives us a glimpse of Russ’ softer side when we see his childhood bedroom with all of his football trophies and old photos. How did you go about striking that balance between the less flattering traits he has while also ensuring he’s someone the audience is rooting for?
Waldron: The show is R-rated, and he’s an R-rated protagonist, and so he does flawed things. The nice thing about your star being Glen Powell is you’ve got a lot of leash because audiences love this guy. That’s a real benefit to us. Like I said, I don’t want to ignore that people like this are out there. This is a guy who made a mistake and has been hating himself for a long time after it, and he’s been dwelling in some dark corners of the internet, just consuming toxin. That moment in the childhood bedroom, the point of that is to show that, in many ways, he’s just a kid. Russ was just a kid when this happened to him and, in some ways, he’s still the little boy that used to love playing this game.
In a lot of ways, that’s what the show is about. When he when he puts on the mask and he gets to be Chad, it reminds him of who he was when he first started playing football. I love that scene, and Glen’s performance is great, and the score by Natalie Holt is really good. It lets you know there’s a human under here.
Powell: One thing that’s really been a great North Star for us is we both have a lot of friends that are in this world that played at all these different levels. I knew we were on the right track [because] when you talk to anyone who’s played professional football, college football, and you say, “If you if you suited up right now, do you still have it in you?” Every single one of their eyes light up. There’s not one person that doesn’t believe they still have some gas left in the tank. I just loved this idea of the habitat you know where you belong. He belongs on that field, and he was ripped out of that ecosystem too early. He still has gas left in the tank, and he’s just in a state of purgatory.
When you are ripped out of that ecosystem, you have no purpose. And it’s why a lot of our friends who have played these sports, they tend to go a little nuts after they they give up the game. There’s a lack of focus. They have put every single ounce of themselves into this thing they love, and then all of a sudden, they’re ripped out from that ecosystem, and they’re trying to find purpose. How do you look forward? Russ is trying to make sense of that, and is trying to not look back, even though all he can do is look in the rearview mirror. I think that’s a really human thing, and it’s one of the things Waldron and I just wanted to capture, which is, again, denial. It’s a denial of your passion. It’s a denial of your purpose.
Eli and Peyton Manning had a lot of feedback on your arm, Glen, and all the technical football aspects of the show, but I’ve also heard that Eli was pretty hands-on in his involvement in scripts and other key components of the show. What was it like to collaborate with him in that capacity?
Powell: When these rights [for a show] came up, Waldron and I were like, “Oh, I think we’re the only two people in Hollywood who actually understand what it is to be a college football fan,” and why we are the guys that need to make this is because we care. We wanted to make the most definitive college football show ever.
We have Eli Manning and Peyton Manning as our guardian angels in that regard, to make calls, to be able to make sure we’re securing rights, and not only that, but to also make sure that I look like a D1 quarterback that can compete for a national championship. You see this guy’s arm, just like they did in Eli’s tryout video, you’re like, “That’s a pro arm, that’s an arm that deserves to go all the way.” And obviously with that comes a lot of pressure. Because Waldron and I, we watch football every Saturday and Sunday. We know what the real deal looks like.
Waldron: Sports fans are savage. Part of being a sports fan is tuning in to watch your team and expecting them to suck. That is the core of every sports fans experience, and here we are making a show for those sports fans. So that’s our threshold. The good news is we’re fans too, and we’re skeptics of everything. We went into it, [and] we tried to be our own harshest critics. I think we got it right.
The writing on this series is tapped into internet culture and Gen-Z humor — a lot of that comes into play with the character Danny [Frankie A. Rodriguez]. He rattles off references to Deuxmoi [the celebrity gossip Instagram account], for example. What was the motivation behind incorporating that language and those references?
Waldron: It’s a show, in some ways, about a lot of people who are spending too much time on the internet. Between Russ — Danny is a college student in 2025 — all of these coaches who are constantly caught in the negative feedback loop of being the coach of a struggling team — it had to sound modern. We tried to write it like the real world and we had a great writing staff with some great young writers that kept me honest, told me that GIFs were out. Texting with GIFs is a very millennial thing to do, which was news to me.
I guess that was a mark of coming up under [Dan] Harmon [“Rick and Morty,” “Community”], but he’s very Gen X. I think it’s just trying to write truthfully to the time you’re living in. These are people who always have phone in their hand, because that phone is constantly telling you if you’re a good person or you’re a bad person. In some ways, that’s what the show is entirely about.
You’ve been friends for a while, but this is your first time collaborating together. What made this the right project to kick off your partnership — besides a shared love of the game?
Powell: I always joke when I tell people about Waldron, I think it’s the best Hollywood first date I’ve ever been on. We just got along. Waldron and I are the same age, we grew up with the same sort of movies. I always find that when you’re writing with somebody and collaborating with somebody, you speak in a language of movies.
But one of the movies that we joked about, that we loved, was “Armageddon,” which is a movie that is probably not the movie that you ever want to reference in fancy film circles, but Waldron and I both unironically love that movie because it’s a ridiculous premise taken completely seriously, and therefore it becomes a really fun thing for the audience. And that is what we are doing in the show. We are Armageddon-ing it. We are taking a ridiculous premise and we’re grounding it in real football teams, in a real world, with real football. Once you have that audience buy-in of what the conceit of our show is, and you take it completely seriously, you have this really fun ride. It’s a flavor that has been missing. We always look for these Hollywood blind spots. We found that the flavor of those great sports movies and just the audience ride was sort of missing.
Glen, it was really fun to see you on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last week talking about the show and your mom’s hilarious cameo. What was it like to be in that room on his first night back after being suspended?
Powell: It was a really special night. It’s really hard to describe. I think I’m still processing it all.
The anticipation for the show seems palpable and people are already talking about Season 2. Are you letting that enthusiasm sink in, or are you trying not to dance before you get into the end zone like Russ?
Waldron: I think we know what happens if you celebrate too early. Hopefully people tune in. We’re really proud of it, and it was a lot of fun to make. I think you feel that in the show.
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