Russ Holliday had everything but a national championship. As star quarterback of the Oregon Ducks, he marched his team to the brink of victory, a single yard from sealing the win. Instead, he dropped the ball on the 1-yard line, leaving the door open for the other team to score. His worst moment wasn’t the fumble, but what came after: after a cancer-stricken fan in a wheelchair called him his favorite player, Holliday lashed out and socked the boy’s father on national TV, knocking over the child in his wheelchair. “It’s the kind of thing that will haunt him for the rest of his life,” announcer Chris Fowler says during the scene. In the world of Chad Powers, that prophecy sticks.
It also fuels the show’s premise. Chad Powers, a six-episode limited series premiering Sept. 30 on Hulu, follows Holliday (Glen Powell) as he concocts an alter ego—a gifted homeschooled prodigy who sneaks onto a college team roster donning a shaggy wig and facial prosthetic. The disguise may sound far-fetched, but the concept is drawn from a real-life stunt successfully executed by NFL great Eli Manning back in 2022. And the series leans into a deeper question: how does a person remake themselves when the world won’t let them forget who they once were? Alongside Powell, who also co-created, co-wrote, and co-produced, the cast includes Steve Zahn, Perry Mattfeld, Frankie A. Rodriguez, Wynn Everett, and Colton Ryan.
For Powell, the story is just as much about transformation as it is about football. His 2023 film Hitman toyed with the thrill of inhabiting multiple identities; Chad Powers expands a real-life stunt into a meditation on failure, accountability, and the cost of reinvention.
The challenge for the actor included embodying two very different sides of a character, mastering football’s technical demands, and balancing humor with pain. “I just knew it was not going to be easy.” Powell tells TIME. “It’s a big swing, and as an actor, when you take on a big swing like that, you’re like, you know what? I’m going to swing as hard as we can and hope we connect. But any time you’re putting yourself out there, jumping into the void, it’s scary.”
Read more: The 48 Most Anticipated TV Shows of Fall 2025
The stunt that sparked a phenomenon
When Eli Manning retired after 16 seasons with the New York Giants, he left as the quarterback who twice spoiled Tom Brady’s Super Bowl runs—upsets in 2008 and 2012 that elevated him from Peyton Manning’s little brother to New York icon. He was known as steady rather than flashy, walking away with two championships, a lasting place in Giants history, and the respect of teammates who valued his calm in chaos.
Three years later, he found a way to stay in the game, just not on the field. ESPN tapped him to host Eli’s Places, a football history series in need of a hook. The Chad Powers segment didn’t come from strategy so much as an idea that emerged in pre-production: what if one of football’s most recognizable faces tried to walk onto a college team?
Penn State’s open tryouts provided the perfect stage—an arena where anonymity still felt possible. Head coach James Franklin agreed to participate only after he was convinced the stunt wouldn’t derail his team’s rhythm. “At the end of the day for me, I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to disturb our process of what we needed to do and not become a distraction,” he explained at a press conference in September 2022.
Wearing jersey No. 200, a shaggy wig, and prosthetics that transformed his face into something vaguely familiar but unplaceable, Manning intentionally lumbered through the 40-yard dash. Agility drills tripped him up. But once he started throwing, the façade cracked. The same quick release that once burned NFL defenses flashed again, sending spirals tight and true. Receivers began calling their own routes, trusting the stranger in No. 200 to hit them in stride. The ball snapped into their hands with a precision that felt impossible for someone who claimed to be homeschooled in rural nowhere.
The segment ultimately ran almost 15 minutes, ending with Franklin announcing that one player had been cut for “terrible testing numbers,” before Manning finally peeled off the wig and revealed himself. The team erupted. The clip exploded online, racking up 17 million views on ESPN’s YouTube channel, inspiring Halloween costumes, and landing Manning on late-night TV to relive the gag. Within days, Chad Powers shirts were popping up in shops and online.
Behind the scenes, Omaha Productions, the Manning brothers’ company, saw the unexpected momentum as a chance to expand beyond documentaries and alternative NFL broadcasts. They began shopping the character around Hollywood, where Powell and co-creator Michael Waldron seized on the opportunity to turn a viral prank into the foundation for a series.
From prank to game plan
Powell and Waldron saw possibility beneath the surface of the prank. Where millions laughed at a stunt, they recognized the potential for a character study—and, eventually, a series. When the two heard Omaha Productions was interested in adapting the Chad Powers sketch, they jumped at the chance to collaborate, rooted in their shared love of college football and a desire to push the premise deeper. “We immediately saw an opportunity to do not just the first really authentic college football show, but also a surprisingly deep exploration of the kind of mind that would put on a prosthetic and change their identity,” Waldron explains. “If you’re going to invest in something that insane, there’s real darkness that would have to drive you.”
The series follows the fictional Holliday, a former star whose arrogance burned every bridge. Eight years after fumbling the national championship, he’s still chasing professional glory. But his true nature proved so damaging that only a new persona might offer a way back.
Powell drew inspiration for the role from a patchwork of real athletes. “There’s not one face to Russ Holliday,” he says. Still, former Texas A&M Aggies quarterback Johnny Manziel and his improvised moves on the field provided a useful lens: when the defensive pocket of players collapsed, he had a knack for slipping through gaps and finding daylight. Powell tried to mirror that instinct in Holliday. In the series premiere’s opening sequence especially, he says, Holliday’s style is particularly “reminiscent of Johnny.” Powell, a longtime college football fan, also thought about players whose dazzling careers “ended suddenly, or seemingly suddenly.”
Inspiration wasn’t enough. Powell trained with Nic Shimonek, Patrick Mahomes’ personal quarterback coach, drilling footwork and release mechanics until the Manning brothers signed off. Then came the prosthetics: hours in the makeup chair, silicone adhered to his face, the wig itching under stadium lights. He had to move naturally under all that artifice, sweat pooling beneath the mask as he took snaps and read defenses. Powell gave up alcohol during filming. If he drank, he’d sweat it out, and risk loosening the prosthetic mask glued to his face.
All of that was just the physical grind. The bigger test, Powell says, was embodying the character. “The ask was extremely high and extremely technical,” he says, adding, “I also had to create this tragic backstory that you sort of root for, even with all of his flaws.”
A battle beneath the helmet
What unfolds on screen reflects broader anxieties about identity in the digital age. Unlike another contemporary sports comedy, Ted Lasso, which begins from a place of optimism, Chad Powers begins from a place of self-doubt. Its protagonist isn’t a cheerful outsider but a man whose authentic self was too destructive—the only way forward for Holliday, the show contends, lies in performance.
Powell says he felt the weight of the role from every angle: technical, dramatic, even tonal. As co-creator, writer, producer, and star, he was one of the “custodians” of the story, and there were, as he puts it, “no off days.” He had to master the precision of football’s most demanding position, ground the duality of Russ and Chad in something believable, and make sure the show never felt, in his words, “schizophrenic tonally.” He adds, “There are a lot of ways this one could go wrong. It’s a small target to hit.”
Waldron contends the biggest challenge was walking a tonal tightrope. “It’s not Ted Lasso, and while it’s inspired by Mrs. Doubtfire, it’s not Mrs. Doubtfire,” he explains. “For a story like this to work, there had to be some darkness and pathos lurking beneath the surface. It makes it funny in hopefully a subversive way, and I think when we do go to heartfelt, human places, maybe you’re able to invest in it in a more interesting way.”
Even the accent became part of the character’s psychology. An Austin, Texas native, Powell consulted his dialect coach from Hitman for different accents across West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas and Mississippi, ultimately going with what he thought served the character best. “It’s really the most odd matchmaking session ever,” he explains. “You’re matching an accent to a face, and making sure it felt simultaneously harmless and sweet.”
The series resists clean answers. In one sequence—a team-bonding water balloon fight at Coach Hudson’s (Steve Zahn) lake house—the gentle Chad Powers vanishes. Holliday’s killer instinct surfaces, his need to dominate breaking through the carefully constructed persona. He hurls balloons with the same competitive fire that once drove him to greatness and ruin, unable to let even a meaningless game remain meaningless. The moment crystallizes the series’ central tension: is Chad Powers teaching Russ Holliday how to be better, or simply how to hide more effectively?
The Manning brothers’ presence as executive producers ensured Chad Powers wasn’t just a comedy about rebuilding but a football story rooted in preparation and discipline, down to the accuracy of Powell’s shotgun snaps. “Most executive producers just sort of take the credit and run,” says Powell, but “Eli was in the writers room making sure we didn’t veer off track. To have guys at that level that are willing to be your partners and to be sort of a safeguard for quality is a really incredible thing.”
The cost of a comeback
Chad Powers arrives at a precarious moment, when careers can turn on a single clip or comment and redemption unfolds under constant scrutiny: apologies, orchestrated comebacks, carefully managed vulnerability.
Powell and Waldron build light comedy around that modern reality while examining an uneasy truth: reinvention can be exhausting. “We wanted this to take place in the real world of right now,” Waldron says. “That meant real pain, real consequences to the things you say or do.”
That focus on accountability sets Chad Powers apart from the redemption tales that inspired it. As Waldron explains, unlike Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire, where the ruse ends with a tidy reveal, here the disguise continues to ripple outward, carrying psychological and social fallout long after the mask comes off. “Now more than ever with the internet, people feel like they can’t make any mistake,” Waldron continues. “If they do, they’ve been trained from a million different sources to certainly not to say they’re sorry, not to take accountability.” In today’s culture, he adds, the more difficult journey isn’t simply being forgiven—it’s learning to take responsibility in a world that often trains people to do the opposite.
It’s a question that extends beyond the fictional Holliday. Manning’s brief turn as Chad Powers was never meant to last, yet its resonance showed how audiences cling to the fantasy of starting over, even if only in jest. The show takes that fleeting prank and asks what happens when disguise isn’t a joke but a lifeline, when the mask becomes the only face the world will accept. Beneath the prosthetics and punchlines lies a story about the cost of pretending and the possibility of renewal.
“This show is really about hope, second chances, and redemption, which is something I think we all need right now,” Powell says. “If it fills people up with the spirit of humanity, lifting them up rather than kicking them while they’re down, then I think that’s a huge victory.”
The post The Real Inspiration Behind Glen Powell’s Football Comedy Chad Powers appeared first on TIME.
