Glen Powell and Michael Waldron preview absurd comedy and big heart in Chad Powers: 'Let's Mrs. D...

Plus, what it was like for Powell to have Super Bowlwinning quarterback Eli Manning critiquing his every football move in the sports series. Glen Powell and Mic

Plus, what it was like for Powell to have Super Bowl-winning quarterback Eli Manning critiquing his every football move in the sports series.

Glen Powell and Michael Waldron preview absurd comedy and big heart in Chad Powers: 'Let's Mrs. Doubtfire this s---'

Plus, what it was like for Powell to have Super Bowl-winning quarterback Eli Manning critiquing his every football move in the sports series.

By Lauren Huff

Lauren Huff

Lauren Huff is a writer at with over a decade of experience covering all facets of the entertainment industry. After graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin (Hook 'em, Horns!), Lauren wrote about film, television, awards season, music, and more for the likes of The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline Hollywood, Us Weekly, Awards Circuit, and others before landing at EW in May 2019.

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September 4, 2025 9:00 a.m. ET

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New comedy series *Chad Powers *allowed star and co-creator Glen Powell to have an experience he's never had before: getting mercilessly booed by an entire stadium full of people.

To be fair, he asked them to do it. You may have seen clips online from the incident at one of the University of Georgia's actual football games last fall. "Out of context, it seems like, wow, Georgia f---ing hates Glen Powell," the star says with a laugh. "I put up on the jumbotron, I said, 'Please make an announcement that I — Glen Powell, Texas fan — am shooting a new show called *Chad Powers*, and to boo him as loud as humanly possible while he's on this field.'"

As viewers will experience when the show is out in the world in a few weeks, the crowd happily obliged. "If I would've gotten booed without any sort of prodding, I *may* have felt differently about Georgia after that experience," he jokes. "But no, the Georgia fans did exactly what we asked them to do."

The crowd is one of many very real pieces of the *Chad Powers* playbook that should delight college football fans. For starters, it's based on the viral sketch produced by NFL Films and Omaha Productions that aired on ESPN+ as part of the *Eli's Places* series. In it, Super Bowl-winning quarterback Eli Manning goes undercover in heavy prosthetics and a wig and dons the alias Chad Powers to try out as a walk-on quarterback for Penn State football.

Glen Powell as Russ Holliday on 'Chad Powers'.

Disney/Daniel Delgado

This version — in which Eli Manning serves as executive producer along with Omaha Productions' Peyton Manning, Jamie Horowitz, Ben Brown and ESPN — picks up eight years after an unforgivable mistake nukes the promising football career of hotshot quarterback Russ Holliday (Powell). Russ then tries to resurrect his dreams by disguising himself as Chad Powers — a talented oddball who walks on to the struggling South Georgia Catfish team. Luckily for him, his dad is a famous Hollywood makeup and prosthetics artist.

The Catfish may be fictional, but they play in the very real Southeastern Conference, and against its very real teams (like Georgia). Sports fans will also recognize several cameos from major sports media personalities and talking heads. And, yes, Eli himself makes an appearance. "It'd be hard to do the show based on Eli's sketch without having Eli in it," says Michael Waldron, who co-created the show with Powell. "I wasn't trying to draw the ire of that guy. So we knew we had to find a place for Eli in the show somewhere. We thought we did that in a really fun way... and there's one or two other ones that we think are pretty fun."

Steve Zahn as Coach Hudson and Wynn Everett as Tricia, a booster for the Catfish on 'Chad Powers'.

In something of another fun college football Easter egg, Wynn Everett, who plays a wealthy and obnoxious Catfish booster on *Chad Powers*, was the real-life face of the SEC's "It Just Means More" campaign, which began in 2016. The cast is rounded out by Frankie A. Rodriguez as Danny, the instantly lovable and hilarious team mascot who has an unlikely friendship with Chad; Perry Mattfeld as Ricky, a coach with a soft spot for Chad; Quentin Plair as Coach Byrd; and Steve Zahn, whom Waldron jokes is in "his Coach Taylor [of *Friday Night Lights*] era," as Catfish coach Jake Hudson.

Waldron and Powell were in the trenches together bringing all of this to life from the beginning. They first met several years back, on "probably the best Hollywood date" Powell says he's ever had, where they bonded over a shared unironic love of *Armageddon* — specifically the way it "took a ridiculous premise and took it completely seriously."

A few years later, the Mannings' production banner approached them both to adapt *Chad Powers*, and the two immediately jumped at the chance to make something together, where *they* could take their own ridiculous premise and take it completely seriously. And thus, the basic x's and o's of *Chad Powers* were born.

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"Eli has served us up a lie in the basic IP of this," Powell recalls telling Waldron in their earliest meetings. "I said, let's chase what makes the basic IP special. Let's *Mrs. Doubtfire* this s---, right? Let's try to take that completely seriously, and what would that look like? I think it's so crazy it just might work."

He continues, "The more that Waldron and I got under the hood of it and really started talking about the nature of cancel culture, the nature of what it is like to be sort of tossed out by society, to have a special gift and to no longer be relevant to society, to feel more comfortable wearing a mask than to actually have your own face to all these things, that we were like, I think we're actually dusting around something that is not just funny, but something that's actually incredibly heartfelt and incredibly layered and nuanced and very present to everything that's going on in the world, and I think something that a lot of people would resonate with."

The pitch was a total touchdown for Waldron and Powell, the actor says. "We wrote the pilot and people seemed to really, really love it. So they ordered the show, and I got to say, this has been the most fun I've ever had doing anything."

Frankie A. Rodriguez as Danny, a.k.a the school's mascot, Whiskers, on 'Chad Powers'.

Disney/Daniel Delgado

Of course, getting to work with two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks probably has something to do with that. Eli would weigh in on everything from outlines to scripts, and even joined the writers' room on occasion. "He helped me build confidence because I'd be like, 'Oh s---, Eli Manning likes this,'" Waldron says. "We're doing right by Eli, which felt really good. He actually sat in with our writers' room one day and just let us pepper him with questions about what's a Tuesday look like for a college quarterback? We just see these guys on TV for three hours on Saturdays, but we're telling a story about all the hours before and after that, and Eli helped us kind of fill out those days."

The Manning brothers also helped legitimize everything — both in terms of getting the crew access to real college football games, stadiums, and events, but also with quarterback mechanics. All of the footage of Powell playing football as Chad or Russ, went straight to Eli for his feedback, which was humbling, to say the least.

"I would get feedback from Eli about exactly what I was doing," Powell says. "He's like, 'Hey, here's where your feet are sitting on the snap.' Like, 'Hey, your hands need to be more up. They're too far down.' So the weirdest part is, I had one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time literally just coaching me on how to play a quarterback at this level. It is *humbling*, but it's also incredible."

Both Waldron and Powell grew up as massive college football fans. For Waldron, it's the Georgia Bulldogs. For Powell, it's the Texas Longhorns. Waldron's producing partner Adam Fasullo went to the University of Pittsburgh and is a diehard Pitt fan. Zahn loves the Kentucky Wildcats. Mattfeld was a USC Trojan. Director Tony Yacenda is a Penn State fan. Plair actually played at the University of North Carolina for the Tar Heels.

Quentin Plair, Clayne Crawford, Steve Zahn, Wynn Everett, and Perry Mattfeld pn 'Chad Powers'.

Disney/Daniel Delgado

So, one might say that college football is in the very DNA of *Chad Powers*, and that lends a certain authenticity and passion for the sport that bleeds through every frame. But, while sports movies were definitely on Waldron's mind, his hope is that the comedy series is just as accessible for fans of NCAA football as it is for people who don't know a sack from a fumble.

"*Bull Durham* was a real reference point for me in this, so I thought about that a lot," the *Loki* creator says. "Something that was a love letter to baseball, but also you could enjoy that movie if you didn't give two s---s about baseball — it's ultimately about people and about love.

"I'd hope maybe that's the show's defining quality, is the surprising amount of heart that we were able to find in the show based on this sketch," Waldron continues. "We realized early on in the writing process together that we could tell a really compelling story, not just about football, but about a guy trying to find his way back and trying to figure out who he really was."

In fact, Powell says they've been showing the episodes to friends who maybe don't have the same level of college football acumen — "because obviously this needs to work for everybody," he says — and the reactions have been through the uprights.

At the end of the day, Powell says his goal is "to be a part of things that are actually entertaining people." He explains, "One of the things that I always find to be so silly about this business is there's those things that people make, where you have to kind of do that deep breath before you watch it and you're like, *oh, I've got to watch this, everyone says so*. No, I want to be a part of the thing that people can't wait to watch, and you feel better afterwards."

Perry Mattfeld's Coach Ricky (right) develops a soft spot for Powell's Chad (left).

Basically, Powell hopes that *Chad Powers*, when it's finally thrust into the bright lights, entertains people the way it's entertained him. "There's just no better feeling than to be in a world that is full of this — it's inherently cinematic, inherently energetic, and then everybody just brings it. Not to say that we're like a championship team," he says, pausing with a knowing smile, "but... I really feel like the cast here really is that. And it was awesome. I'm so excited to unleash this thing on the world."

If he had one nitpick, though, it's that he didn't get a cameo from his beloved Longhorns in there. But, now that a more robust film incentive passed in Texas, Powell has high hopes of changing that should the show get a second season. "To literally have no representation of Texas on this screen, it kills me," he says. "I told Waldron, 'Okay, I'm going to give you Georgia, but when it comes time for season 2 and we get this damn tax incentive, you better believe Texas is going to be on that screen."

A season 2 hasn't officially been greenlit, but Powell is hopeful that, unlike the Georgia game, that *Chad Powers* will have fans cheering in his direction. "America has to vote, that's a democracy that we live in, and once the people vote, then they determine our fate," he says. "But at the same time, I feel very confident that people are going to really respond to the show." (In other words, Longhorn Nation, you know what to do.)

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Hulu's *Chad Powers* will kick off on Tuesday, Sept. 30 with a two-episode launch. New episodes stream weekly on Tuesdays leading up to the season finale on October 28.**

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