Of course, Beard wasn’t exactly thriving even before that poster appeared. When we first caught up with him in Episode 2, his marriage had imploded, Ted had spent the intervening years back in Kansas, and Beard — who’d been working under Roy with AFC Richmond’s men’s team — looked considerably worse for wear.
When TVLine hopped on Zoom with Hunt to dig deeper into Episode 4, we asked how much of Beard’s current state can be attributed to Jane, and how much stems from spending three years without his best friend.
“I think it’s mostly Jane, but it is certainly partially Ted,” Hunt tells us. “We’ve established, I think — at least demonstrated — that without Ted in his life, Beard would be in a much worse place. But that doesn’t mean he’s all healed. That doesn’t mean he’s perfect. Far from. He’s still got a lot of demons that he’s trying to keep at bay.”
Working for Roy, Hunt figures, also afforded Beard considerably more latitude: “I’ve imagined Roy is a different kind of boss [who offers] a different kind of affection, and part of that is not really caring what Beard looks like when he comes in to work, or even assuming that it has anything bad attached to it” — hence his disheveled appearance in Episode 2.
As for what goes through Beard’s mind when he sees that poster? According to Hunt, it’s not so much the shock of seeing Jane again, or even seeing her made up to look like him. It’s knowing immediately what she intends to do with their story.
“The moment he sees that poster, he knows everything that this show is going to be, basically, and he knows she’s going to be pitching her side of things,” Hunt explains. “And he doesn’t know how much she’s going to exaggerate things, which I think she does. We don’t quite prove that, but I do think that’s the case. I think we thought that in the writers’ room as well.”
But knowing Jane, Beard also knows to expect the unexpected: “He both knows exactly what it’s going to be, but within the framework of her being so unpredictable, he has no idea how far she might go — and that notion is terrifying.”
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