Either Phil is brilliant at fanservice & baiting, loves attention for any reason, or he’d actually be well up for playing Roy/Jamie as sexual or romantic. Perhaps it’s a bit of all three.

[quote] Actor Phil Dunster would 100% be up for [making Jamie Tartt a bisexual character]. Whether it’s filming a post-episode interview for AFC Richmond’s social media which was nominally about leading into the “Beard After Hours,” episode but will forever be remembered for the fact that when Jamie mistakes the journalist’s questioning as an implication that he and Beard are hooking up, to which his scornful response is that Beard is not his type because he’s too scratchy — not, you know, that he’s straight — or liking and applauding an Instagram comment on his page from a fan suggesting that The Crown actor Josh O’Connor should play Jamie’s boyfriend in season 3 it’s easy to believe that there is plenty of scope to view the character as something other than straight, and it’s that it’s scope his actor recognises as well. I’ve always suspected the poster of Roy that we know on Jamie’s wall was something of a childhood crush, an idea bolstered, naturally, by Dunster and co-star Brett Goldstein straight up making cracks about Apple censoring the lovemaking scenes between Jamie and Roy — right for the story, apparently, but just too hardcore in the end.

[quote] Dunster is also the only cast member to have mentioned being aware of Roy/Jamie fanfiction and shipping, and while a good handful of people are into it, it’s not an idea that dominates the wider Ted Lasso fandom spaces by any means. In fact, Ted Lasso is not even a show whose audience particularly gears towards transformative works on the whole. (The show, as of October 2022, has around 3300 works on Archive of Our Own and less than 10% of those are Roy/Jamie stories. Those figures, in the grand scheme of both transformative fandoms or shipping culture, and also Lasso’s wider popularity and audience engagement, are not high.) More widely appreciated by the general audience is the relationship between the actors, whose affectionate bromance made a splash at the Emmys last month when Goldstein, who picked up another Best Supporting Actor trophy, brought Dunster, who unfortunately once again missed out on a nomination, as his date, and in media commitments leading up to the awards, Dunster has continued to enthusiastically fawn over Goldstein, which to date has included waxing lyrical about how hunky Goldstein’s body is, attributing their crackling chemistry to how good he smells, and declaring that he is in love with him.

[quote] All very fun, but more importantly, he’s pointed out the fact that the real love story of Ted Lasso, specifically within the intricate under-one-another’s-skin-for-life triangle his character is locked in, is Jamie and Roy. He’s 100% correct, just in the sense of what those characters mean to one another. They belong together, in whatever way you’d like them to be, and they both belong with Keeley too. “It’s setting it up for where you want to keep the journey going with these three characters, because it’s almost never ending. They could be this kind of awesome family that keeps [twirling together motions] for eternity,” Juno Temple says of the connection between the group. Keeley pouring those two coffees the boys brought her into one cup during the season 1 finale is truly the perfect metaphor for the scenario. I’m not putting Roy on this list overall, but by nature I guess he’s included here because Jamie is Jamie, and because it’s Jamie, Roy might go for it even if he’d never gone for it before. It’s very unlikely the show will go there, but it’s a credit to Ted Lasso that I feel as if it’s not absolutely impossible. That they’re forward-thinking enough and subversive to be in the small bracket of shows who just fucking go for it.