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Brett Goldstein as footballer Roy Kent: "A computer-animated actor and comedian"
Photo: Apple
The hair sits perfectly, the beard is accurately shaved and the skin stretches almost wrinkle-free over the prominent cheekbones: the aging soccer star Roy Kent from the popular Apple streaming series "Ted Lasso" looks just too perfect to be real for some viewers.
Is the striker perhaps not played by actor Brett Goldstein at all, as Apple claims in the credits?
Because the corridor also seems a little wooden and the facial expression is limited to rather emotionless facial expressions due to the role, series fans have their own theory: The British actor Brett Goldstein does not take part in the series at all. He might not exist at all. The soccer player's figure is computer-generated graphics (CGI), with which Apple wants to show technically what is possible.
The conspiracy theories about Roy Kent have been running through the net since the start of the second season of the successful series around trainer and long-term optimist Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis).
It even made its way into Wikipedia.
Someone there allowed themselves the fun and adjusted the description.
On Friday morning, the actor's official website read: "Brett Goldstein is a computer-animated actor and comedian."
Many users are also sure of one thing in social networks and forums such as Reddit: Roy Kent is a virtual character.
Many believe that production companies are technically advanced enough that they can secretly undergo computer characters from viewers.
Someone else wants to have seen through the trick and feels reminded of a scene from the soccer video game series "Fifa" when they see a picture from the series.
And this is what someone else thought it might have looked like when Kent was animated:
For fans of the series, it's a kind of déjà vu.
With the start of the first season, the discussion about Roy Kent made the rounds.
In a Reddit forum, participants have been speculating for months about whether Roy Kent is a CGI character.
A large part is convinced of it.
The actor himself commented on the conspiracy theories on Thursday.
But instead of eliminating the rumors, Brett Goldstein fueled the debate with his Instagram video by placing a filter with an emoji avatar over his face and confusing fans even more.
"There's always a lot of crazy shit going on out there on the Internet these days," Goldstein says in the clip.
"I want to make one thing clear for good: I'm a totally normal person who lives in a special effects house and does normal human things like rendering, buffering and transferring data."
So Brett Goldstein makes fun of the discussion about himself.
Because he also knows: Apple's large CGI master plan would have to go back to 2003.
It was then that the actor had taken on his first major roles on television.
It would have been quite a lot of appearances in talk shows and guest roles like in the series "Doctor Who", in which the effects specialists would have had to use the actor artificially.
At its keynote speech in April, graphics card manufacturer Nvidia, among others, demonstrated that computer-animated people are difficult to distinguish from real people in videos.
The real head of the company, Jensen Huang, was only seen briefly at the beginning of a video presentation.
Most of the time, a virtual image of Huang spoke to the audience.
In the meantime, hardly anyone noticed.
The company only resolved the computer deception afterwards.
On the other hand, viewers of “Ted Lasso” retain the illusion that Roy Kent looks like an avatar.
But why should Brett Goldstein end the debate too?
There are significantly worse conspiracy theories than the question of whether an actor looks better than reality allows.
