Bryan Rowland interview: ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ director
As he sits for a Zoom interview with Gold Derby, Bryan Rowland admits he’s a little bit shellshocked to be here, as his career trajectory has been something of a whirlwind. He got his start doing cinematography on documentaries. Then he met Ryan Reynolds, and it led to doing promotional material for the actor. Then he started editing episodes of the docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham” for Reynolds and partner Rob McElhenney orf “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” fame. Suddenly, they ask him to direct an episode on very short notice. Then for Season 2 of “Wrexham,” Reynolds and McElhenney asked Rowland if he could be its showrunner. And finally in July, he received Emmy nominations for both his directing and editing on “Wrexham.” “It’s just been absolutely amazing and terrifying,” Rowland admits, “and very surreal. It’s unbelievable that I’m actually sitting here talking with you today. I think I’m the king of imposter syndrome, so I’m just going to ride this while I can.” Rowland spoke to Gold Derby as part of our “Meet the Emmy Nominees” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“Welcome to Wrexham” comes across a bit like what “Ted Lasso” would be if it were real. It’s an FX sports docuseries that follows Reynolds and McElhenney after their purchase of a downtrodden football club in Wales and their subsequent attempts to resurrect it as its new owners. But the Season 1 episode whose direction Rowland was nominated for is atypical to the rest of the show. Called “Wide World of Wales,” it’s something of a mock variety show that very cleverly merges a cooking show, a late-night talk show and a “SportsCenter”-style sports news conceit – all of it climaxed by a tune from Welsh native songstress Charlotte Church.
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How Rowland was recruited to put the episode together is a story in itself.
“Out of nowhere, a few weeks before we were supposed to shoot this particular episode, I was brought in and they threw a script my way,” Rowland remembers. “I was like, ‘Wait, ‘Wide World of Wales’? What is this?’ So I started reading through the script, just trying to see the nuts and bolts of what it is. And I’m seeing, OK, we need to build an ESPN set. We need to build a ‘Tonight Show’ set. We need a cooking show set. We need to get these various guests onboard. I’m like, ‘When are we shooting this?’ ‘Oh, about two weeks,’ I’m told. And so I had this very, very short runway to kind of get it up and running.”
One of the reasons that “Wide World of Wales” emerged so suddenly was the realization from the producers that they needed to give the audience more context of what the nation of Wales is all about. So Reynolds and McElhenney came up with the variety show idea “where Ryan and Rob kind of take us through what they understand about Wales and bring in different people,” Rowland explains. So well did Rowland do that shortly after he finished, he got a call from one of the executive producers, George Dewey, who asked, “Hey, we all really liked working with you, would you like to be involved with Season 2 at all?” Rowland told them sure. “And now they’ve got me showrunning along with Josh Drisko for Season 2,” he marvels. “And I was like, showrunner…how does that work?”
Flying by the seat of his pants seems to be working for Rowland so far, however. They don’t just hand out Emmy nominations for effort, after all. “In all the prep for the production (on the episode I directed), I just kept scratching my head and wondering, ‘How is this going to work?’,” he admits. “I think it came together really, really nicely, and I think it was well-received and a lot of fun to work on. It’s been a pretty wild ride.”
You can stream Season 1 of “Welcome to Wrexham” on Hulu+. Season 2 drops in September on FX and Hulu.
