Disney+ and Hulu have dropped the official trailer for Chad Powers, an original sports comedy series led by Glen Powell. Watch the trailer above and read on for the essentials.
Plot & Cast
Eight years after an unforgivable mistake nukes his once-bright college career, hotshot quarterback Russ Holliday (Powell) hatches a comeback plan: become someone else. Under heavy prosthetics and a new persona, he walks on to the struggling South Georgia Catfish as “Chad Powers.” Or, as Powell puts it in the trailer: “South Georgia is having open tryouts? I am going to do a Mrs. Doubtfire, but with football.”
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The cast also includes Perry Mattfeld as Ricky, Quentin Plair as Coach Byrd, Wynn Everett as Tricia Yeager, Frankie A. Rodriguez as Danny, and Steve Zahn as Coach Jake Hudson.
The show traces its origin to Eli Manning’s 2022 sketch, where the former NFL quarterback donned prosthetics and attended an open tryout at Penn State — the disbelief from players and attendees became the seed. You can watch Manning’s amusing undercover experiment, produced by ESPN, right here:
Behind the Disguise
Powell and co-creator Michael Waldron built Chad from the voice out. Powell tells The Hollywood Reporter they wanted a voice that was “naturally comedic and fun,” but that “would also feel like a shot from the hip.”
Working with his Hit Man dialect coach, Susanne Sulby, they aggregated the “dirtiest accents from the South” and “Frankensteined” them together. Or, as Powell puts it: “If you were to try to invent a character and somebody was like, ‘Hey, throw on a voice right now.’ Under duress, what would you put on?”
Waldron is blunt about the stakes. “The voice is really the fucking shark in Jaws,” he says, explaining: “If the voice doesn’t work, we’re sunk.”
The look took time, too. Powell says there was “a lot of trial and error.” “There are shots that I have on my phone of horrific versions gone wrong that are, like, terrifying. Where it’s like, ‘What happened to this person?’ This is a show that no one would watch, it’s so grotesque.”
There were practical headaches as well — helmets, chin straps, wigs — and even a no-alcohol rule. “During the beginning of football season, I had to be absolutely sober, which was a first for me,” Powell says.
Who’s Involved
The series comes from co-creators and executive producers Powell and Michael Waldron. Executive producers include Eli Manning; Omaha Productions’ Peyton Manning, Jamie Horowitz, and Ben Brown; ESPN’s Burke Magnus, Brian Lockhart, and Kati Fernandez; Waldron and Adam Fasullo for Anomaly Pictures; Luvh Rakhe; and director/EP Tony Yacenda.
Powell also co-writes and executive produces under his Barnstorm Productions banner.
Release Date
Chad Powers will have its two-episode premiere on September 30 on Disney+ and Hulu, with new episodes streaming weekly.
