SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the Season 4 finale of Apple TV‘s Ted Lasso, titled “Being Alive.”

If you thought the penultimate episode of Ted Lasso was packed with Mae’s shocking death, Keeley’s (Juno Temple) surprise pregnancy and Zelda’s (Tracey Ullman) unexpected (for some) deceit, you’d better buckled up for the finale.

The 56-minute episode featured a touching memorial for Mae, including a moving song by Niamh (Aisling Sharkey) and Siobhan (Rex Hayes); not one but two AFC Richmond manager shakeups with Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) quitting the men’s team to take the helm of his old team Chelsea, signaling a possible exit for the fan favorite character; and Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds) promoted to head coach of the women’s team upon Ted’s (Jason Sudeikis) recommendation, with him and Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) as her assistants.

And that was not all. The shareholder showdown offered a twist too, with Zelda’s henchman Hugo switching sides and securing the Milk sisters’ shares for Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), which, along with Mae’s 2% left to her in her will, gave the accidental football club owner an unassailable majority 51% ownership. Additionally, Ted told his son Henry about his father’s suicide. The finale also managed to squeeze in a marriage proposal as Rebecca spontaneously popped the question to long-term boyfriend Matthijs in her office.

Hunt, who co-created the series and co-wrote the finale with Sudeikis, spoke with Deadline about the episode’s twists and how they set up a potential fifth season, addressing speculation that a renewal is imminent. He explained whether the finale marked the exit of Goldstein as a series regular (and Temple by association as Roy and Keeley are a couple again). Goldstein is the creator, exec producer and star of a new Amazon comedy series, Escorted, in addition to his duties on Apple TV’s Shrinking and his movie career.

Bad news for fans of Ted Lasso’s original Richmond men’s team who have been holding out hope for a larger presence of the players in the show’s new incarnation. The cameos by most of them in the Season 4 finale may have been the last we saw the team in a planned “passing of the torch” moment from the men to the women, Hunt said, explaining why Phil Dunster’s Jamie Tartt didn’t make the scene.

Hunt clarified how Ted’s conversation with Rebecca led to Alice’s promotion and how the new dynamic may impact Ted. He also cleared confusion over the title of the finale, originally listed as “The Departing Lass,” which changed to “Being Alive” when the episode aired.

Additionally, Hunt addressed the divisive character Zelda and whether Ullman would come back next season an shared the surprising inspiration for Beard’s new look in Season 4.

In separate parts of the interview published earlier, Hunt revealed that there was an idea for the late actor Anthony Head to be in the Season 4 finale and explained why the finale employed a cover of the theme song performed by Brandi Carlile and whether that the new version may be here to stay.

DEADLINE: I hear that Season 5 renewal is imminent. What do you say?

BRENDAN HUNT: Where did you hear that?

DEADLINE: I have my sources.

HUNT: Well, then that’s news to me. I certainly hope it happens, and I’m optimistic, but yeah, haven’t heard anything official yet. It would be nice though.

DEADLINE: And you don’t have a Season 5 writers room going, correct? My understanding is that the writers room will start after the green light.

HUNT: Yeah. As happened for Season 2, they can greenlight a room before they greenlight a season if they want, but neither has happened.

DEADLINE: There were two big manager changes at AFC Richmond in the finale, the most important for longtime fans being Roy Kent’s departure. We know how busy Brett is off-screen — he has a new show on Amazon, obviously Shrinking on Apple TV, movies. So, should we assume that he is leaving as a series regular?

HUNT: No, not necessarily. It is acknowledging that he’s a busy man and giving us some wiggle room I would say. But no, there’s no expectation of losing Roy and Keeley. But they are two very busy people, so wiggle room is a smart thing.

DEADLINE: So it’s possible that both Brett and Juno may not be series regulars in Season 5 and the Roy and Keeley storyline may not be as prominent?

HUNT: We have no idea. We don’t know if we’re coming back, and when we come back, we don’t know what’s going to be going on in their lives. But yeah, they’re both really busy. So yeah, the wiggle room.

DEADLINE: Ted’s line to Rebecca about wanting “to talk to her about the newly open manager position” came just after Roy had resigned, so I assumed that was for the vacated men’s team job, and Ted was pitching himself or Nate who had just resurfaced. Instead, we got Coach Chilton promoted. Are the two things connected?

HUNT: He doesn’t say the men’s manager position.

DEADLINE: But why did he say “newly open”?

HUNT: Because he’s coming in to let her know that he is no longer the manager of the women’s team.

DEADLINE: OK. Let’s talk about the decision to change that dynamic. It does make sense, Alice has proven herself, and it’s a women’s team, but Ted for the first time being a backup singer, how will that be? And will the show be called Alice Chilton next season?

HUNT: Yeah, I think Apple’s really excited about that (laughs). We just have to wait and see what is going to be the full impact of that dynamic. I’m certainly interested in finding out like, is this a bit pie in the sky for Ted to think he can just shift down to backseat and have someone telling him what to do and where to be and making demands of him? We’ll see how how he adjusted that. It might not be as easy as he thinks.

DEADLINE: What prompted him to do that? We didn’t get to hear his arguments to Rebecca.

HUNT: Well, he clearly is not spending enough time with his son, and he says to Henry in that previous scene, “I’m going to make some changes to make sure that I’m not missing as many of your games.”

DEADLINE: And the men’s team, is it now completely in the rearview mirror? Roy Kent was the only character that kept it in the picture even though we didn’t see any of their games or any of the players until the finale. Do we care about who the manager will be? Is there any chance for Nick Mohammed’s Nate to come back?

HUNT: I’m not sure that we do care. We do love Nick, though. The men showing up in that last episode was really meant to be a passing-of-the-torch moment, and I think that worked well. We’ve been very judicious with how much we see of the players this first season, and whether or not we’re coming back, we’ve taken the long view from the beginning.

Back in Season 1, we actually met the players just a very little bit, and a little more in Season 2 and Season 3. So if we’re able to come back, then yeah, we’ll certainly be able to start giving more time to these players now that we’ve gotten done a little bit.

DEADLINE: Speaking of the players, the two Irish twin sisters emerged as standouts at the end of the season with their hilarious telepathy pig bit in episode 9 and their touching performance at Mae’s memorial in the finale. Will we see more of that next season and more of Alice’s personal life? There was only one scene with her partner this season.

HUNT: We’ll have a lot to see but we like all these characters, and we’re gonna try to get into all of them, a little bit more now that we set the table with them. But in terms of the twins, Rex and Ash were just fantastic together. There were a few good nominees for the twins when we were casting, but in the end it was like, these are them, and the degree to which they are different and similar is fantastic. They’re so game for everything, and then to finally unlock that twin-telepathy thing towards the end was just really really cool.

DEADLINE: Did they sing that song themselves and how did that come about?

HUNT: That is a traditional Celtic song that gets sung at funerals a lot. It was actually first pitched by Declan Lowney, one of our directors, who is an Irishman himself. And yeah, they crushed it.

DEADLINE: Phil Dunster was not in the finale with the rest of the team. Was it just for logistical reasons because he has the HBO series Rooster?

HUNT: It was a logic thing. Jamie lives in Spain [He plays for Barcelona]. We’ve already seen him at that point, so we didn’t need to bring him back just to stand and applaud with the rest.

DEADLINE: Speaking of Jamie, your character Coach Beard underwent quite a transformation this season, and there was online chatter that Beard may have tried to copy Jamie Tartt’s look.

HUNT: I didn’t see that.

DEADLINE: Talk about Beard’s physical transformation. Is it simply a midlife crisis, or was there more to it?

HUNT: Yeah, he is going through a bit of a midlife crisis. First the Jane stuff, then trying to come back from the Jane stuff, and then getting the gut-punch of miscommunication on New Year’s. We were not specifically going for Jamie Tartt but what a compliment. I’ll take it.

DEADLINE: Was there inspiration for the look, though?

HUNT: Not specific to Jamie, no, the hair was more Hugh Grant in his Four Weddings and a Funeral days, and then went to the costume department and our designer Jackie Levy, and it was awesome. Like what trying-too-hard-to-look-like-a-young-person stuff do we have? Now maybe she had Jamie in mind. I can’t speak for her, but that was never discussed specifically.

DEADLINE: And the new look introduced at the end of the finale, was it Walter White-inspired?

HUNT: It’s just a bald head and goatee, Walter White didn’t invent that.

DEADLINE: Tracey Ullman’s character Zelda, I’m sure you’ve seen the discourse, she was very polarizing. Talk about her arc, and since Zelda technically is still a pretty significant Richmond owner, would you want her to come back?

HUNT: We love Tracey, and we love that character. Zelda has a stake but not a majority one. Again, the same with with Roy and Keeley, there’s wiggle room there. Hopefully we get the chance to have her come over for some more. But we’re not plot-obligated to have her around in every episode, and Tracey can go on with her life.

DEADLINE: The title of the finale changed last-minute to “Being Alive”? Why? Was “The Departing Lass” too British?

HUNT: Well, the change had been made a few weeks ago — it just apparently didn’t make it to whoever puts those titles up, so it was not as late a change as it seems. It had been “Being Alive” for the last like month at least. That was Jason’s call entirely. He didn’t walk me through his thought process entirely, what it did. I watched it last night, and when Hannah has her line about being alive, it was a nice little echo, frankly. So it is a little more than what the episode is about than just about the lass who has departed and a a cute little pun.

DEADLINE: I don’t think we ever find found out how the women’s team ended the football season, did they win the final game?

HUNT: They got promoted in the second to last episode, and then the win in the last episode is that they sold out. So the results of the game itself better than that.

Noa Cohen spent months making a movie reconstructing October 7, but none of it can compare to the film she still sees in her head.

Cohen was far (relatively) from the Gaza border when the Hamas attacks on communities in Southern Israel began three years ago.

“I was in my apartment in Tel Aviv with my partner and our dog. The news started — I think my mother messaged me to turn on the TV — and suddenly we couldn’t believe what we watching,” she recalls.

But it only became real a little while later, when news reports began the grim business of putting names up on the screen.

“You’d start seeing victims and you’d think ‘I went to school with that person.’ Or, ’they’re a friend of my friend,’” she says, unable to hold back a tear. “Death was all around, with so many people you know.”

Cohen is sitting in a hotel restaurant at the Toronto Film Festival in mid-September, having just premiered the Israeli movie Our Loves, one of the first film dramas about the traumatic day.

The process has been a kind of therapy for her — and, she hopes, Israelis writ large.

Written and directed by the OG Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher, Loves tells an intimate-but sprawling account of that day as seen through a host of interconnected and ethnically diverse Israelis who lived it — a pair of police officers forced to the front lines in the absence of the army; a young religious woman and a secular young man odd-coupling on the run through the fields near the Nova festival amid bodies and terrorists; a former army tough guy named Shabi who takes matters into his own hands with a band of eager teenage novices; and Cohen’s character Liri, a young woman who ends up in a Southern Israel kibbutz saferoom with her boyfriend’s mother as Hamas gunmen surround them and eventually set the house on fire to flush them out.

Against the backdrop of a gruesome day, the Hebrew-language movie unfolds individual emotions and lives both before and during the attack, everyday problems of course not stopping with the tragedy, just interacting with it.

“When something that tragic happens, the human stories — the individual people and what they’re going through — gets lost,” Cohen says. “That’s what we’re trying to honor in the film.” (Nesher says he had a similar goal for the movie: “We wanted to make it not just a dark blot, we want to remember their individuality, we wanted the world to know each of these people was special,” he told the audience onstage at the TIFF premiere.)

The 24-year-old Cohen, who speaks a nearly accent-free English, splits her time between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. She played a very different character two years ago in Netflix’s Biblical epic Mary (the Virgin Mary.) She found this portrayal of a modern Israeli woman to be a little closer to home, but also painful and difficult, every scene bringing her back to that trauma. “I think it helped and hurt?” she says

Cohen has one of the film’s standout scenes, involving an ambulance, an estranged father and a childhood song — and her character isn’t even conscious for it. Like several moments late in the film, it offers a hug amid the carnage, with reconciliation happening despite or because of the trauma.

Nesher, who made the 1970 iconic local hit The Band (a kind of Israeli M*A*S*H), used an unorthodox development practice reminiscent of Mike Leigh and other art-meets-life Method hounds. As part of the casting process, for instance, he had actors talk about details from their personal lives; Cohen and Shalom Michaelshvili, who plays her father Shabi, each got in a room and talked about their respective challenging paternal and daughter relationships.

“I was then surprised to get the script and see whole chunks of what we said in there,” Cohen says with a combination disbelieving/ that-sneaky-devil laugh.

Executive produced by Shari Redstone along with Len and Emily Blavatnik, Our Loves has held a private screening at the WGA in Los Angeles and is seeking broader distribution in the U.S. It will be released in Israel next weekend, notably after the anniversary but just before national elections.

The film has drawn the somewhat odd criticism — including, candidly, from a review in this publication — that it’s told almost exclusively from the point of view of Israelis, a complaint to which Cohen responds thoughtfully. “The film portrays many different perspectives of the people who went through that day. Portraying that doesn’t need to erase the point-of-view of those who didn’t and have gone through other difficult things,” she says, adding, “This is just the story we’re telling.”

She is even more troubled by the Israeli-film boycott calls from the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone. “Silencing artists because of government policies closes conversation. And don’t we need to keep that open?”

It is a principle, she says, that applies to the movie too. “I mean, you don’t have to agree with a government to hear the stories of its people.”

Cohen says the past year has unfolded a fresh post-traumatic process in her native country. “You couldn’t really grieve until all the hostages were home,” she says, alluding to the 251 people who have now all been returned home, or their bodies have. So really we’re not even at the end of the first year of grieving. And there will be many more years.”

But, she adds, “the movie offers a little hope. We want people to feel that after watching it too.”

EXCLUSIVE: Vertical will be having an Unbearable Christmas this holiday season, specifically the comedy starring SNL alum Alex Moffat, Julia Stiles, Caroline Rhea, Mena Suvari and Emmy Award winner Stephen Root (Widow’s Bay).

In the pic, out-of-work weatherman Troy Tipton (Moffat) has one Christmas mission: get back the beloved teddy bear he pawned for holiday cash. With wife Becca (Stiles), mother-in-law Dawn (Rhea), and the kids in tow, Troy hits the road from Ohio to Florida in his old news van. But the family adventure gets even wilder when they discover the cherished bear is actually a priceless Teddy Roosevelt antique worth millions.

The movie reps the debut feature of writer director Kevin Cate. The feature will be released this holiday season in an exclusive streaming deal to be announced soon.

Rounding out the cast are Kennedy Moyer (Task, Roofman), Ben Lewis Doherty (Task, upcoming Focker-in-Law), Blake Sennett (3rd Rock from the Sun, Boy Meets World), and Valyn Hall (The Righteous Gemstones), with a cameo from every local weatherman’s hero, Al Roker. Cate co-wrote the screenplay with Sennett.

“I grew up on the holiday comedies you wore out on VHS – the ones you can quote to a complete stranger and they get it,” said Cate. “That’s what we set out to make: something quotable, rewatchable, and true whether you’re the kid in the backseat, the parent driving, or the grandparent complaining about both.”

“From the beginning, we knew we wanted this film in front of as many people as possible,” added Sennett. “That’s why Vertical won – they’re audience and artist-friendly.”

“Unbearable Christmas is one of those heartwarming movies destined to join the holiday rewatch canon,” said Vertical Manager of Acquisitions Rachel White. “Kevin has made the kind of big-hearted family comedy that’s all but vanished – hilarious, moving, and with an all-star ensemble firing on all cylinders.”

Pic was produced by Sennett and Cate under Cate’s indie banner Clinging Vine Films, with Rick Kearney, Stiles, and Moffat executive producing.

The deal was negotiated by White and SVP of Acquisitions Tony Piantedosi on behalf of Vertical and Jason Ishikawa and Isadora Johnson of Cinetic Media on behalf of the filmmakers, with legal services by Knol Hanly Garrett.