HITS

Fresh off his Emmy win on Sunday as best actor in a comedy TV series for the Apple TV Plus show Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis stressed the benefits of teamwork and trust on Sept. 21 , at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

“It felt good” to win the Emmy, especially because two of his co-stars also won and the show won as well, he said while being interviewed by journalist Soledad O’Brien, CEO of Soledad O’Brien Productions.

“It’s a little bit of a lie” when nominees say it was good to just be nominated, he conceded.

But, noting he was up against tough competition that included his former Saturday Night Live co-star, Kenan Thompson, Sudeikis said he didn’t know he would win until his name was called.

After the La La Land/Moonlight mix-up at the Oscars in 2017, he joked, he didn’t know he won for certain until he saw his name was indeed written down as the winner on the paper that came out of the envelope.

He grew up being active in team sports while avoiding “toxic masculinity,” he said. His experience with team sports went on to make ensemble comedy more appealing to him than standup comedy, he explained.

Standup “scared me” and “it was never a call for me” but he did it a couple of times here and there, he pointed out.

“To succeed and fail within a group, within an ensemble, is something I always gravitated towards,” he said.

Coming from the world of improv, trust means everything, he went on to say. “If you give people enough trust to succeed and fail, but also know that if they start to fail, you’ve got their back and they got yours” is important, he explained.

“That’s family. That’s teamwork. That’s literally teamwork making the dream work,” he added.

Sudeikis was a writer on Saturday Night Live since 2003, before joining the show’s cast in 2005. “I was ready to leave” when he asked producer Lorne Michaels if he could join the cast, he recalled. Luckily, Michaels quickly made him a member of the show’s cast after that, he said. Sudeikis left the show in 2013 but has been back several times for sketches, including several in which he returned to play Joe Biden. He is scheduled to return as a host for the first time on Oct. 23.

The actor’s comments on trust and teams came only a few hours after Salesforce executives stressed the importance of those things during the opening Dreamforce session.

“A digital headquarters becomes an essential building block to building a trusted enterprise in today’s world,” Salesforce CEO, chairman and co-founder Marc Benioff said.

“We are definitely in a new world” in which we have been seeing a “crisis of trust” globally, Benioff said. Salesforce’s goal is to “transform that world into a world of trust” again, he noted.

“There’s a playbook for this trusted enterprise” that organizations need to be today, he said. It included the need to be “focused on trust today more than ever before” and the need to have “direct, trusted relationships with our customers,” he said.

The company also announced new capabilities that integrate Slack across Salesforce’s products and industry solutions, along with new Slack innovations that it said “improve collaboration across organizational boundaries and empower teams to embrace asynchronous working.”