The most unhinged four minutes of Ted Lasso happen in the treatment room of AFC Richmond, in Season 2, when a Ghanaian tech billionaire named Edwin Akufo (Sam Richardson, character-actor extraordinaire) drops the charming bit entirely and tears into a professional footballer with the venom of a man who’s just been told no for the first time. Up until that scene, Akufo had been doing something prestige TV almost never lets African characters do: existing as a person of taste. He walks Sam Obisanya around a private museum he has, by the way, bought out for the day and filled with actors so he doesn’t have to bring a security detail, showing him the contemporary African painting he intends to repatriate to the Cape Coast Castle museum back home. He pitches Obisanya on a privately funded pan-African super-team in the soft, considered voice of a man who has obviously read books. Then, as a final flex, he introduces him to Banksy. (Akufo, naturally, knows who Banksy is. Banksy, naturally, fumbles a briefcase open on the way out and spends the next ten seconds staring with mild dismay as a small avalanche of spray cans rolls across the marble floor.)
In the next episode, Akufo meets Obisanya in the treatment room at AFC Richmond for his answer. Obisanya politely says no, and the suave-philanthropist mask comes off in the space of roughly half a second. What follows is a full-body tantrum in a coat that costs more than a small car, with insults that simply cannot be reproduced here, in an accent borrowed wholesale from his grandfather’s village outside Accra (where Richardson spent every summer of his childhood).
Richardson won the 2023 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for the performance, which makes the only major Ghanaian role of his career also the only Emmy-winning role of his career, and which is funny in a way that requires a small sigh to fully appreciate.
If you have not been keeping up with Richardson’s filmography, here is the cheat sheet. He was Richard Splett on Veep, the chipper political aide who showed up for one episode in Season 3, somehow stayed seven, and along the way picked up a personal fan letter from Tom Hanks (the actual Tom Hanks).
He and Tim Robinson then co-created Detroiters over at Comedy Central, two perfect seasons of two best friends running a tiny advertising agency and being so devoted to their hometown they should probably charge it rent. He played Aniq Adjaye in The Afterparty, a man who is on screen for several episodes trying to convince everyone he did not murder a guy at a high school reunion. He played Finn in Werewolves Within, a polite forest ranger who is also trying to convince everyone he is not a werewolf. And in his sharpest left turn to date, he played Paul in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, the kind of nice, soft-spoken guy women trust on first sight, which Fennell uses against you to genuinely upsetting effect.
He recurs across all four seasons of I Think You Should Leave as a sort of generic “normal guy in the room with Tim Robinson” type, watching whatever fresh nightmare Robinson is unleashing with mounting alarm. He’s the magic-shop guy who accidentally resurrects the Sandersons in Hocus Pocus 2. He has a small role in the Pixar film Hoppers, which came out earlier this year, voicing a dimwitted graduate student whose consciousness gets uploaded into a robot beaver. The man stays booked, which is why Hollywood loves him, and also possibly why no one’s caught onto the fact that he is actively one of the most internationally pedigreed actors of his generation.
The casting story behind Akufo is, almost, as good as the performance. When Jason Sudeikis and Joe Kelly were building out the fictional soccer team AFC Richmond, they needed a name for the sweet, slightly shy Nigerian footballer who would become the show’s moral compass, and they landed on Sam Obisanya. They picked Sam specifically because they wanted the character to carry the same warmth Richardson had been bringing to Detroiters, which Sudeikis had produced. (Toheeb Jimoh, who actually plays Obisanya, was cast for the warmth; Richardson, for whatever reason, was not initially on the show.)
Then in Season 2, the producers decided to invite Richardson on to play directly opposite his own namesake, and asked him to be everything Obisanya isn’t. Hence the museum, the super-team, the spray cans, the Emmy.
Akufo is a divisive character. Spend twenty minutes on any Ted Lasso subreddit and you will find people complaining that he’s too theatrical, too cartoonish, too much, and what those people are missing is that the too muchness is the point. African characters in mainstream Western television almost never get to be too much. They get to be dignified, they get to be tragic, they get to be quietly noble in the background of someone else’s story, but they very rarely get to be loud, ridiculous, vain, petty, hilarious, and the most exhausting person at any party they walk into.
Akufo is none of those familiar things. He’s just pompous. Pompous like a billionaire on his worst day. The Ghanaian-ness of him is just a fact, like his character’s expensively-tailored suit.
In 2019, Conan O’Brien did one of those late-night travel specials in Ghana, timed to the country’s Year of Return, and Richardson went with him as the cultural guide. They visited Osu Castle, the slave fort on the coast, and sat with a group of African-American visitors from a church in Chicago who were also doing the trip, talking with surprising candor about the very different psychic experience of being Black in Detroit versus being Black in Accra.
Years later, on a video call with Richardson during the height of COVID, Conan recalled walking into Richardson’s mother’s living room in Accra and finding tribal artifacts, imposing portraits of every chief Richardson is descended from, and one plastic Funko Pop of Richard Splett parked in the middle of all of it. It’s possibly the most accurate single image of a modern immigrant kid’s life ever broadcast on basic cable: the ancestral lineage on one shelf, the bit-part HBO character on the next, both being shown off by his mother with the exact same level of pride.
The Akufo performance hasn’t really been mentioned in any of the dozens of “best of Ted Lasso” lists that floated around at the end of the show’s run, which is a quiet shame, because it’s the rare time a Ghanaian actor has been allowed to play a Ghanaian on a global stage with the accent fully on, the cultural specificity intact, and a character with enough on the page to actually act with.
Akufo does come back, briefly. He resurfaces a couple more times across the rest of the show’s run, mostly to stir trouble and remind everyone he’s still very rich and still very mad about the Obisanya thing, but he never gets another scene like the locker room. Which feels right, because what could he possibly do for an encore.
Written by: HQ
