Glen Powell, Michael Waldron on ‘Chad Powers’ Finale, Filming at UGA Halftime

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Chad Powers” episode 6, titled “6th Quarter,” now streaming on Hulu.

Glen Powell and Michael Waldron’s journey to create the college football comedy “Chad Powers” — about a disgraced former star quarterback who hatches an insane plan to get a second chance on the gridiron — started like all great Hollywood bromances.

“On Raya,” Powell deadpans, breaking in as series co-creator Waldron begins to tell the story of how he first met the actor. (OK, they didn’t actually swipe right on the dating app, but Powell and Waldron’s first bro-date was indeed virtual.)

In 2021, their agents at CAA set up a general meeting over Zoom, much like this conversation with Variety. At the time, Waldron — who created Marvel’s “Loki” and the wrestling drama “Heels,” and is an alum of the Emmy-winning animated series “Rick and Morty” — was in London working on “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Meanwhile, Powell was about to break into the big leagues with a standout performance in “Top Gun: Maverick.” But even their reps couldn’t have predicted the two would have such natural chemistry.

Powell and Waldron clicked over their taste in movies; “Armageddon” was the first title they discussed, and the disaster flick gets a major reference in the “Chad Powers” pilot. The duo also bonded over being Southern guys turned L.A. transplants who “live and die” by their favorite college football programs. Waldron is an alum of the University of Georgia and a massive Bulldogs fan, while Powell is working his way toward a degree at the University of Texas and is a fixture on the Longhorns’ sideline next to Matthew McConaughey.

“From the moment that Waldron and I met, it was like the best first date of all time, where you sit there and you’re like, ‘I could spend all day with this dude,’” Powell recalls. “It’s a really rare thing in Hollywood to find someone who is playing at the level that [Waldron] is, and a genuine college football fan who sees the blind spots in terms of sports stories.”

There were no concrete plans to work together, but the two stayed in touch. “We always knew if the right thing came along, we’d want to jump on it,” Waldron adds.

First down came when CAA flagged that Omaha Productions, the company led by NFL Hall of Famer Peyton Manning, was interested in adapting a sketch from the show “Eli’s Places” into a larger project. Of course, Powell and Waldron were already familiar with the viral clip — where Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning goes undercover at walk-on tryouts for the Penn State football team disguised as a quirky, yet supremely talented rookie named Chad Powers.

“I don’t think anybody else in the agency raised their hands, and both of our eyes lit up,” Powell says, his peepers widening for dramatic effect. “I called Michael, and we just riffed on it.”

The ideas bounced back and forth on that phoner ultimately became the bones of the show.

“Give Glen all the credit, because in our first conversation, I was like, ‘Well, you couldn’t actually do “Mrs. Doubtfire.”’ Waldron says. “Like, you couldn’t do a show where the guy puts a mask on. And Glen just said, ‘Yeah. But what if you did?’ I was like, ‘Oh, he’s insane. And that is the show.’ Because it’s such an impossible thing to pull off, [but] what if you did actually try to?!”

Indeed, the premise of “Chad Powers” is far-out. But it’s so offbeat that there’s room to get creative with the play calls.

The pilot opens with Powell’s character, arrogant college quarterback Russ Holliday, leading his Oregon Ducks team in the National Championship game against Georgia at the Rose Bowl. Just when it seems like Holliday’s miraculous play will win the game, he makes a devastating mistake and drops the ball before crossing the goal line — giving Georgia the win. Then, Holliday makes matters worse by getting into a fight with a fan on the sidelines. Eight years later, the disgraced quarterback hatches a plan to reclaim his former glory by donning a prosthetic mask, mustache and wig to try out for a struggling football team, the fictional South Georgia Catfish, under a new, less-toxic identity: “Chad Powers.”

As “Chad,” Holliday lands a spot on the Catfish team. But his ruse isn’t easy to pull off: In the cold open of the second episode, a fly creeps inside Chad’s prosthetic face and he panics, trying claw the insect out. It’s the type of hyper-specific and slightly deranged humor that makes “Chad Powers” stand out from your typical sports comedy.

But it also works as a metaphor for the series itself, with pathos layered underneath the surface of the macho premise — if you’re willing to scratch a little deeper.

“We got really excited as we explored the idea of a broken guy who had been a jerk and had made a mistake and became a pariah — which I think happens over and over again in this modern, very online age — [and] if, by wearing a mask and playing a better person, that he could accidentally become a good guy,” Waldron says of the profundity they discovered in the zany plot.

“I’m always drawn to these stories about identity and people wrestling with who they are versus who they want to be,” Waldron continues. “And the fact that we could tell a story with this much depth, and in such a funny way, is only possible because Glen was like, ‘Let me take such a crazy leap with this performance.’”

Powell accepts the compliment, admitting that he was “terrified” to dive into the performance for a variety of reasons. “But like all great things, it was a bit of a Hail Mary pass,” he says. “Every character in this show is at a point in their life where they’re willing to throw a Hail Mary pass. Waldron and I were willing to throw that pass, too.”

The duo co-wrote the pilot episode of “Chad Powers,” first texting back and forth while they worked on their other blockbuster projects to build the protagonist’s character arc. That included building Chad’s relationships to his new coaches and teammates (Steve Zahn, Quentin Plair and Clayne Crawford), his unlikely love interest Coach Ricky (Perry Mattfeld), his father (Toby Huss) and his lone accomplice, the Deuxmoi-obsessed team mascot (Frankie A. Rodriguez).

As the two pop culture junkies riffed, inspirations like “Armageddon,” “Bull Durham,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” “The Phantom of the Opera,” “2 Fast 2 Furious” and “Mulan” all ended up weaving their way into the fabric of “Chad Powers.”

“It’s so nice to have a collaborative partner that you just are in awe of their brain and what they bring to the table,” Powell says. “And it’s not just a cheap joke; it’s a joke that’s rooted in reality. The one buy-in you get from the show is a man wearing a mask. Everything else has to feel grounded in real scenarios and real stakes, and that’s what we were navigating at every turn. The announcers, the stadiums, the way people move through that world and the way coordinators talk to each other has to be bulletproof, so you buy into everything around this wild conceit.”

In keeping with the authenticity, the Catfish team opponents are real college football squads: the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) Rebels (Eli Manning’s alma mater; Manning also makes a cameo on the sidelines), the University of Tennessee Volunteers (Peyton Manning’s college team) and the Georgia Bulldogs. The Dawgs loomed large over “Chad Powers’” six-episode stretch — which was somewhat of a meta experience for the duo, since Georgia and Texas were major rivals during the 2024-25 season, too. In fact, Waldron’s Bulldogs beat Powell’s beloved Longhorns twice. (“What is this? A fucking ambush?” Powell cries, feigning dismay when I mention how life imitated art.)

The “Chad Powers” team shot the season finale during halftime of a sold-out game in Athens, Ga., last October and asked the 92,000-strong crowd to boo Powell as the Catfish run onto the field to face their in-state rival at Sanford Stadium.

“Not to say that they wouldn’t have booed me anyway, but we did ask them to boo,” Powell clarifies, laughing. “We had done rehearsals, knowing that the stadium was going to be really loud,” he continues, remembering how it felt to hear the roaring crowd. “But when I went out there, to literally have an entire stadium booing you, I got off the field and I told Waldron, ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever been so ready to run through a wall in my life. Like, that was crazy!’”

That electricity was exactly what Powell and Waldron aimed to capture, and the experience mimicked how Powell felt working on “Top Gun: Maverick,” which filmed aboard active aircraft carriers.

“That’s why ‘Top Gun’ feels authentic,” he explains. “We didn’t want this show to just be a half-hour football comedy. We wanted this thing to have scope and scale and the energy of college football, which is easier said than done.”

It was a tricky shot to begin with, given the charged atmosphere, and the Atlanta-based crew had just six minutes to shoot the sequence on the field.

“This was my directorial debut, and I thought, ‘Well, let’s make it easy,” Waldron cracks. “It’s the season finale, and we wanted to end it with a bang. We had the opportunity to do it, and by that point, I believed in my team of like-minded psychopaths to pull it off.”

In order to make it work, Waldron and his crew — including director of photography Mark Schwartzbard and first A.D. Kris Krengel — were disguised as coaches on the sideline. The team utilized a flag system to communicate amid the crowd noise.

“We basically had two bites of the apple, and our steadicam op [Joseph B. Hernandez] is going to get this great orbiting shot of Glen and Perry,” Waldron explains. “And at the last minute, I [told Perry,] ‘You know what’d be really cool is if you tossed him the ball.’ So suddenly, the degree of difficulty for Perry and Glen gets 5,000 times harder.”

Thankfully, Powell and Mattfeld are pros, nailing the pitch and catch on both takes.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever have a better day in my career,” Waldron says, sounding equal parts relieved and proud. “But that represents the entire experience of filming the show. Everybody pulling together to do something that should be impossible but turns out to be so much fun and really beautiful.”

The series’ six-episode run ends with plenty more of Chad’s story to tell — Will the underdog Fish beat the big Dawgs? Will Chad’s identity stay secret now that Coach Ricky knows the truth, too? Will Danny ever be featured on Deuxmoi? Powell and Waldron have ideas for a second season when Hulu officially renews the show.

“It’s a make-or-break thing for me that the University of Texas be included,” Powell says. “I told Waldron, ‘If I have to support the UGA football program and not the University of Texas one more time, I’m gonna break.”

Waldron chimes in: “On my Season 2 whiteboard, on one of the episode blocks, I just have ‘Texas’ written.”

Until then, the pair seem quite satisfied with what they made of this massive opportunity.

“The reason I do this is because I couldn’t play,” Waldron says, something he realized while filming. “That was such a career highlight, and to get to do it with a friend at the top of his game, who loves this stuff as much as I do, it’s a dream. I mean, this is the dream job of all dream jobs.”