If early Lockdown One was dominated, in televisual terms, by Netflix’s weird and amoral documentary Tiger King, then the middle phase belonged to Ted Lasso. When its first episode dropped on Apple TV+ in August 2020, the premise felt familiar and unchallenging. It was a comedy – even sillier, a sports comedy – about an American coach played by the always-likable Jason Sudeikis, who is parachuted in to save a struggling English Premier League football team, AFC Richmond. Cue lots of fish-out-of-water gags, soccer-football misunderstandings and a narrative arc that ultimately sees the perennial underdogs bite back.
Ted Lasso was all that, but it emerged that it was a lot more, too. Much like Lasso himself, the show won over doubters with waves of relentless positivity and an underlying message that kindness prevails. “It tricks you with the whole sports comedy part of it, right?” says Toheeb Jimoh, who plays AFC Richmond linchpin Sam Obisanya. “It becomes a way to Trojan horse these really interesting characters and truths about us through the guise of, ‘Oh, it’s just this zany comedy about football and Americans and British people.’ And you can’t look past the fact that we were all locked at home, no one could see their parents or hug each other. It came at a really important time for…” he stops and laughs: “the world! But we couldn’t have known that when we were making it. There was just some universe magic dust sprinkled over it.”
Sam, like the show, has also shown unexpected depth. In the first season, he was reserved and insular: a young Nigerian kid in England struggling to find his way on the pitch or off it. But in the second he blossomed, becoming an integral part of Richmond’s success on the pitch, and starting an unlikely but heartwarming relationship with the team’s steely owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham). In one episode, he leads a player revolt against Dubai Air, Richmond’s main sponsor, because it is owned by a company that refused to clear up an oil spill in Nigeria.
Although he was pretty well unknown when he was cast in Ted Lasso, it quickly became clear to everyone on set that Jimoh was a special talent, according to his co-star Brett Goldstein, who plays the team’s Roy Keane-esque enforcer, Roy Kent. “Working with Toheeb is like what it must have been like working with George Clooney on ER,” Goldstein said last year. “It’s like, you’re doing a good job, but you’re not George Clooney. This guy’s going to be Batman.”
Jimoh, a 25-year-old who grew up mostly in Brixton, south London, shakes his head when he re-hears the compliment. He’s not been cast as Batman (yet), but he excelled in the 2020 BBC film Anthony, about a black teenager murdered in a racist attack in 2005, and he is about to star in a new Amazon Prime series, The Power, a supernatural thriller based on Naomi Alderman’s bestselling novel. He pulls out his phone, which has a screensaver of him and Goldstein mugging for a selfie. “Brett needs to stop saying that, because he’s clearly the George Clooney of our show,” says Jimoh. “I’m obsessed with that man. He could be a dickhead, because he’s won two Emmys now, but he’s just the sweetest, kindest guy.”
To be fair, Jimoh, who was nominated for an Emmy last year for his performance in the show himself, is very much not a dickhead either: attentive, polite, quick with a disarming smile. He puts at least some of this down to working on Ted Lasso, now in its third season. “Especially in this season, you can see little Teds in all the players and even the management group,” says Jimoh; the effect is compounded by the fact that on the morning we meet, off-duty, he’s wearing a quilted AFC Richmond Barbour jacket, given to the cast during the first season. “The Lasso way is there. Everybody’s taken it. And if I’m ever out and somebody stops me, I can’t not be Sam. They kind of require me to smile and be happy.”
So, that’s not what Jimoh is really like then? “No, no, I’m miserable,” he replies, with a stern face. “I’m a miserable, horrible guy.” But he can’t keep it up and starts sniggering. “A lot of the story is that you can be the cynical version of yourself, or you can stay open and look for the good in situations. And I’ve tried to take that on in my life and in my career.” Jimoh has a broad grin now. “I can’t talk about the show without smiling.”
Part of the reason that Jimoh has taken to Sam Obisanya, he thinks, is that Sam’s experience mirrors his own. Jimoh was born in the UK, but his parents returned to Nigeria with him when he was one and stayed for six years. That’s when they moved back, this time to Brixton, to a “two-up, two-down” where they still live today. And that was Jimoh’s home too until recently, when he moved into a flat nearby with his brother and cousin. “We don’t have a couch or a dining table,” he says. “Literally, we’re just sat on counter stools and beds, and there’s a TV. That’s it. But really enjoying it… just having to deal with adult stuff. If I don’t do something, it doesn’t get done. Yeah, being an adult sucks.”
As the attention has blown up with Ted Lasso, Jimoh credits his family with keeping him grounded, especially his dad: “I could have won 15 Oscars, 17 Baftas, a Grammy and a Golden Globe, and my dad would have just been, ‘Yep, it’s good.’”
Jimoh’s older brother, who works in IT, is his main wingman when he is invited to sit in the front rows of fashion shows or go to parties in the Hollywood Hills. “We went to Egypt for a Dior show and I took my brother with me,” recalls Jimoh. “He’s got long hair, plaits, but he took his hair out and had a big afro. And I ran into Naomi Campbell and she thought he was one of the models, I think because he just had a similar look to the rest of them. And she was like, ‘Oh, I wish I could have done a walk in front of the pyramids in Egypt for one of my first shows.’ And I cottoned on and was like, ‘Nah, he’s a computer guy!’ So I fumbled the bag for him with Naomi Campbell.”
Jimoh did bits and pieces of acting growing up, but making a career from it seemed like a long shot. He concentrated more on his studies, and was head boy of his secondary, the Norwood School – until he was stripped of the position. “I got caught selling sweets in the playground,” he says. “It was that time when Jamie Oliver was like, ‘You guys can’t have sweets,’ because of sugar and obesity and all that. And the kids, they all wanted sweets. I went to the head teacher and she said: ‘We’re legally not allowed to do that.’ So I just started slinging sweets, bro! Also I needed to pay my way through drama school auditions.”
The scandal didn’t hold Jimoh back, and he won a place at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. It was only when he arrived there that he realised how ridiculous his odds had been. “You know, 3,000, 4,000 kids apply to drama school for 26 places,” he says. “And I was dumb enough to think that I could be one of them.” Also, to put it bluntly, Jimoh’s ethnicity didn’t help him. “If you’re talking dark-skinned black boys, I was the only one in my year,” he goes on. “It’s changing now, but back then you would notice a trend of ‘OK, there’s one dark-skinned black kid, there’s one light-skinned girl or one light-skinned boy in a class.’ If I got into a drama school, somebody who looked exactly like me probably wouldn’t get into that same drama school because there’s already one of me.”
That Jimoh has gone on to have so much success so quickly, is, he reasons modestly, down to some lucky breaks. “It’s moments like this where you go, ‘This isn’t entirely me, I’m not responsible for this,’” he says. “I’m just being put in great positions and I’m a hard worker and it just clicks. Yeah, I don’t have an answer for that.”
The Power, a nine-part series that starts this month, is set to be another big ticket. The show documents a world, not dissimilar to our own, in which women are suddenly able to release electrical jolts from their fingertips. It starts with a handful of teenage girls, but “the power” spreads and soon women become the dominant gender. Jimoh plays Tunde, a Nigerian video journalist, whose reports spread word of the phenomenon.
Tunde is the main male protagonist in the show, in a cast that also includes Toni Collette and Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho. The Power was also female-led off-screen, with an all-women writers’ room and female directors. “Especially after Ted Lasso, it was nice to not be surrounded by smelly boys,” says Jimoh. “That show was the most testosterone-fuelled environment. If you want to grow a Y chromosome, come to our rehearsal room. It’s almost the opposite on The Power.”
There’s no word yet if there will be a second season of The Power, but don’t be surprised if there is: the first series covers less than half of Alderman’s book. Ted Lasso’s future is less certain: when it launched Sudeikis was adamant that it would be three series and out. Whether that has changed, Jimoh isn’t telling. “Shooting this season, it feels like there’s a closing of sorts,” he says. “Whether that’s closing of chapter one, or whether that’s the closing of the book of Ted Lasso, I don’t know. That’s up to them. But there are avenues, if we wanted to carry on.”
For Jimoh, meanwhile, America beckons. “It does seem like my career is drawing me towards there,” he says. But he has other ambitions, closer to home. This summer he will be Romeo in the Almeida Theatre’s hyped production of Romeo and Juliet and ever since drama school he’s been writing a play, loosely autobiographical, called Chameleon Boy. It tells the story of a young man with African roots and the code-switching he has had to effect to find a place in modern Britain.
“I’m finding now, as I grow, just where I fit in all of this,” says Jimoh. “But I will say that being a black Brit, a Londoner, a Nigerian – all that stuff doesn’t feel like separate things to me any more. They feel like they’re all merging into this one culture that I share with Dave or Stormzy or Marcus Rashford. We’re all finding this thing where we’re not in-between things. We’re here.”
The Power is streaming now on Amazon Prime
Stylist Vivian Nwonka; assistant Scott Hobson-Jones; groomer Courtney-Reece Scott using AJ Crimson, Kiehl’s, Fenty Beauty and Mac
