It’s just a few days after the second season of Ted Lasso has wrapped production, but Juno Temple shows up on Zoom with distinctly Keeley Jones–esque hair: a massive ponytail cascading behind her, with butterfly clips adorning the crown of her head.
“Well, I love a clip-on ponytail in general,” Temple says, crediting series hairstylist Nicky Austin for her look that day. “So actually we’ve used some of my personal clip-on ponytails as Keeley.”
With her love of fashion, experience with fame, and, yes, collection of hair extensions, Keeley does share some DNA with Temple herself—and it doesn’t take long after Keeley is introduced to realize she, like Temple, is somebody special. Near the end of Ted Lasso’s pilot episode, Keeley arrives in the AFC Richmond locker room brash and smiling, there to pick up her hotshot boyfriend, Jamie (Phil Dunster), and flirt just a little with the rest of the team. Later on she returns to pick something up and shares a moment with Ted (Jason Sudeikis), helping him hang the crooked, handmade “Believe” sign that will come to stand for the entire underdog Richmond team.
In that one scene Keeley reveals that she is famous, wealthy, and popular—but also kind, the first person who seems immediately in tune with the ethos that Ted will eventually spread to the entire soccer club. It was Sudeikis who initially suggested the role to Temple, and in their early conversations, she says, “from the get-go, the way he described her—she just has a really good heart. She genuinely wants the best for people.”
A former “Page 3 girl” and model, Keeley is still social-media-savvy—“Avoid #Richmond, or #wanker, or #dick,” she warns Ted in the pilot—but, reaching her 30s, struggling to keep up. “She’s fighting, I think, in her brain of how to keep up with being relevant,” Temple says. “She’s dating the young, hot football player, but it’s not necessarily giving her everything she needs.” In her early meeting with Sudeikis, he laid out Keeley’s entire emotional arc—her breakup with Jamie, the beginning of her relationship with Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein)—but there was one story that had them both sold on just how far this character could go: the relationship between Keeley and Hannah Waddingham’s club owner, Rebecca.
As the only two major female characters in a sports comedy dominated by men, Keeley and Rebecca could have fallen into any number of tropes, or at least an episode-length fight to amp up the drama. But Keeley and Rebecca instead fall almost immediately into an affectionate friendship and business relationship, one that Temple is clear was reflected in real life—of Waddingham, she says, ”She’s changed my life for the better, forever.”
Spending time with Rebecca transforms not only Keeley’s personal life—she takes on a role doing publicity for the club, which leads to her spending more time with Roy—but also her ambitions. Her wardrobe transforms right along with her. “Keeley is a very sort of girly kind of girl,” says series costume designer Jacky Levy. “She likes pink. She loves bright colors. She likes kind of mixing it all up together and just having fun, really. Then she started working at the football club, so I guess her clothes have become a little bit more sophisticated—not in a sensible way. She sort of kept her wildness.”
Keeley’s admiration for Rebecca comes across in her clothing and her hair, which get tamed as she spends more time working at the club. But the series has fun with her modeling career too, finding Keeley on set as a vodka company’s idea of a sexy lion—“I was just throwing so much hair on her head,” Austin remembers—and in a mid-2000s-era promotional video playing on loop at a Liverpool hotel. “That was inspired by Christina Aguilera,” Austin says of Keeley’s wild, crimped hair with a telltale red streak. “We crimped two whole packets of hair, because in the script, what does Roy say? ‘With your crazy hair,’ he calls it. So we couldn’t just have it normal.”
As someone who is familiar with stealing the spotlight, Keeley’s arrival to a gala in the fourth episode is surprisingly understated. There she helps Rebeca learn how to pose on the red carpet and eventually breaks up with Jamie for his selfish behavior. With her plum-colored gown, Levy says, “we still wanted her to look lovely, really lovely, but not in a sort of flashy, showy way. I guess it was just to show another side of Keeley as well. You know, that she wasn’t a ridiculous person that wanted to steal the limelight all the time.”
The stunner moment in the gala episode comes just before Keeley breaks things off with Jamie, offering Roy a heartfelt apology in a situation in which 90% of us would probably get blustery and defensive. “I think it’s where she really listens, do you know what I mean?” Temple says. “It was a big night for Keeley, where she’s listening and taking in a lot of information, which then she reuses throughout the rest of the show.”
With spoilers verboten, everyone swears there are big things in store for Keeley in season two. Austin gestures to a collage behind her with 32 different hair and makeup looks for Keeley alone. “I just hope that girls look at her and copy her,” Austin says, adding that it’s not just about Keeley’s admittedly enviable looks. ”Keeley is just kind through and through. And that’s why Juno loves her so much, and Juno is one of the kindest people I know. So she’s perfect to play her.”
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