[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Chad Powers.]

Yes, the premise of Hulu’s half-hour comedy series Chad Powers, about a hotshot quarterback who wants to resurrect his college football career and decides to disguise himself to do so, is absurd. But with someone as charming and likable as Glen Powell playing Russ Holliday, a disgraced player who made an unforgivable mistake that keeps him from taking the field again eight years prior, you actually find yourself rooting for him to pull off rebranding himself as Chad Powers. With some prosthetics, a wig, teeth, and a Southern accent, he pulls it off enough to be able to join the South Georgia Catfish. However, it’s not as easy as winning over his coaches and teammates, because when Ricky Hudson (Perry Mattfeld), Coach Hudson’s daughter and an assistant coach herself, learns his secret, she doesn’t even have the time and space to deal with her own anger and hurt feelings because the team needs Chad if they’re going to have a chance at winning.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, co-creator Michael Waldron discussed how he’s ended up telling stories set in the world of sports, fine-tuning the look for the Chad Powers transformation, having a plan for Season 2, that big reveal moment between Chad and Ricky, which characters he’d like to dig deeper into, and following the Breaking Bad model.

Co-Creator Michael Waldron Turned His Love of Sports Into ‘Chad Powers’ and ‘Heels’

“If you’ve become a screenwriter, chances are you weren’t the greatest athlete growing up.”

Collider: Are you someone who always thought you would tell stories set in the world of sports? Are you surprised that you’ve done Heels and now Chad Powers?

MICHAEL WALDRON: Typically, if you’ve become a screenwriter, chances are you weren’t the greatest athlete growing up. But I did love sports growing up, whether trying to play them or just watching them. Maybe it does make some sense, in the sense of writing what you know. I love wrestling. Maybe it’s just me trying to avoid researching. With wrestling, I didn’t have to do any research to write that show (Heels). With Chad Powers, there was no research. I already knew it. I’ve been a huge college football fan my whole life. It’s probably rooted, honestly, deeply, in just laziness.

I have to say that I am someone that you would never catch watching sports, and yet I’ve loved both Heels and Chad Powers. There’s something so heartfelt about both shows.

WALDRON: That’s the thing, it’s the heart. With Heels and Chad Powers, it was really important to us that it was authentic. With Heels, once we got the stamp of approval from the wrestling Reddit, I was like, “Oh, we did it.” And I hope we get that from the college football fans too. But you’re really making it to be a universal story. Like all good sports stories, you want it to appeal to people who haven’t played that sport, who don’t know anything about it, but hopefully you can find that there’s something human in it that anybody can latch onto.

Did it take some time to fine tune the look for Chad? Was there too far? Did it go through an evolution?

WALDRON: There were some disgusting versions. Glen [Powell] and I will post them. I have one photo of him where he looks like a gargoyle. It’s so hideous. It was like creating a character in a video game. We went to a special effects shop in Hollywood with this great artist, Vincent Van Dyke, and it was like, “All right, let’s try this nose. What about this show nose with these cheeks? All right, now let’s try the black wig. What about the mustache?” You’re just mixing and matching like a Mr. Potato Head until you find something that doesn’t make you want to throw up. It was a blast. That was so fun.

You have a lot of characters on the show, and I love a show that has such a great ensemble that I would love to watch any of them at home. Is there someone that you’re excited about giving more to in another season, that you didn’t get to explore enough this season?

WALDRON: They’re all great. I certainly want to see more of the assistant coaches, Coach Byrd, played by Quentin Plair, and Coach Dobbs, played by Clayne Crawford. He’s so funny. Of everybody, I’d love to have more of Tricia Yeager, the booster played by Wynn Everett. She’s so funny. She somehow plays this outrageously insane character without ever breaking the tone of the show. I’d like to see what life is like for her at home. What is it like when she goes home to her mansion? We always talk about how all of our characters, in their own way, are wearing a mask. As the show goes on, seeing what’s underneath everybody’s mask is going to be a lot of fun.

I feel like Tricia and Danny could be friends.

WALDRON: Absolutely. The writers were really chasing down the idea Danny getting an internship at Yeager Family Farms. We’re going to get those two together, one way or another.

Co-Creator Michael Waldron Says There’s a Plan for Season 2 of ‘Chad Powers’

“Season 2 would be about the walls closing in on our guys.”

With where you leave things at the end of this season, do you already know where Season 2 would go? What sort of plan have you had from the beginning, and how much has that evolved or changed?

WALDRON: We certainly had an idea of at least where the show would go and maybe where it would end. The best shows tend to have a sense of their ending point, as early on as possible. I know what we want to do with Season 2. Like any good show built around a lie, like Breaking Bad, Season 2 would be about the walls closing in on our guys. The fun is getting in there and writing yourself into a corner. In the case of this season, with the big reveal that happens in episode six, I always thought that would happen at the end of episode six, and instead it happens much earlier in that episode and becomes the whole meat of that episode in the conflict between Chad and Ricky. And so, it’s fun to have your plans, and then accelerate that timeline.

What was it like to figure out that moment on the bus between Chad and Ricky? There’s something so heartbreaking about it because we really care about both of those characters by that point. Did that scene change at all, or did you always know what that moment needed to be?

WALDRON: I directed the finale, and I had my writers in Atlanta with me, which was amazing. We were writing the show as we were shooting it. I knew that it was going to build to this showdown between Chad and Ricky. The atmosphere of a pregame is so loud and so crazy, and the bus almost airlocks closed, so you can have this intimate showdown where, hopefully, the audience is wondering, are they going to kiss? Are we going to get the thing that maybe we’ve been hoping for? And then, it goes the other way. I wrote that and didn’t change it much. I had a new baby, so I fell asleep at 4am writing in, really in the grips of psychosis. And then, we rehearsed it. It was really important that we rehearse that scene with Glen and with Perry [Mattfeld] because it is a tight space, so we taped out the length of the bus and walked it. We had to figure out where we were going to be able to have our cameras and everything. It’s about a seven-minute scene, and I’m so proud of what those actors did. They just absolutely let it rip, and I think it’s a real high point of the show.

How does he come back from that? We want them together, but you’ve left them in this place where it seems impossible for that to happen?

WALDRON: To your question, that’s the job of Season 2. Can he ever win her back? To me, the show is a romantic comedy, and maybe it comes into focus there. Chad and Ricky are, in many ways, the true heart of this thing. The exciting thing about keeping the show going is, how’s it going to work out between them?

‘Chad Powers’ Is Over Once Too Many People Find Out His Secret Identity

“We’re just trying to stack the odds against our characters as best we can.”

Image via Hulu

When you have a character who is hiding who he is and you choose to reveal that to one of the characters, do you also then have to think about who finds out next and how many people will find out how? Like any identity reveal, you have to figure out how much you can keep sharing that with other people.

WALDRON: There’s a reason Breaking Bad waited until its final episodes to really have people start finding out the truth about Walt, and we have to play by the same rules. The show is over, in many ways, once too many people find out. The good news is that the stakes have never been higher for Chad. At the end of Season 1, it’s not just getting caught now. If he gets caught, what happens to Coach Hudson, Steve Zahn’s character. Nobody’s more on the line than him. He literally has a weak heart now, so it’s starting to feel like a matter of life and death. We’re just trying to stack the odds against our characters as best we can.

Release Date

August 30, 2025

Network

Hulu

Directors

Tony Yacenda

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  Perry Mattfeld

  Russ Holliday / Chad Powers

Chad Powers is available to stream on Hulu. Check out the trailer: