Photo: Prashant Gupta/FX
Travis Kelce — tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, boyfriend of Taylor Swift, podcaster, thespian — finally made his much-hyped debut on Grotesquerie as a hot, kind hospital orderly named Eddie Laclan. While it’s beyond premature to suggest that his work on this crime thriller is Emmy worthy, Kelce gives a credible performance in episodes three and four, which debuted on FX and Hulu Wednesday night. Is he kind of playing a version of himself? Yes, but given his lack of acting experience, he exceeds expectations here.
Kelce actually did play a version of himself in his only other previous scripted-television acting role (if you don’t count hosting Saturday Night Live, which was also Kelce playing Kelce). Back in the pre-Taylor days of 2020, he popped up on Showtime’s Moonbase 8, a show that was watched by myself and three other people, which is a shame because it was pretty good. But he was only in one episode. His role on Grotesquerie is much more central.
Travis/Eddie first appears in episode three, introducing himself to Niecy Nash-Betts’s detective Lois Tryon while she visits her comatose husband in the hospital. He immediately encourages her not to drive, since Lois is noticeably drunk pretty much 24/7. The two flirt — he calls her “Miss Sassypants”; she calls him “Fast Eddie” — and there’s an immediate, obvious chemistry between them. Kelce is a naturally warm presence on-camera and holds his own nicely in his scenes with Nash-Betts. Maybe it’s because Eddie tells a whole story about his stint as a male stripper in Juneau, Alaska — “I rocked a banana hammock with the name Big Peter and His Banana Splitter,” he says — but Kelce has a Channing Tatum–esque quality about him. On the surface, he looks like he could be just some handsome knucklehead, but his low-key charm suggests maybe there’s more going on behind that wide, easy smile.
Like, arguably, Kelce himself, Eddie also seems a little too good to be true, to the point where it’s not clear he’s even real at first. At the end of episode three, he and Lois dash out of the hospital together and go for a ride in his red convertible as if they’re Danny and Sandy driving off into the sky at the end of Grease. The scene feels more like fantasy than reality, perhaps a daydream or hallucination conjured from one of Lois’s alcoholic hazes. In episode four, though, Eddie seems more grounded in reality. He takes Lois to an AA meeting, then to a bar afterward where she has a martini, which is not how AA is supposed to work. Later, he meets Lois’s daughter, Merritt (Raven Goodwin), and agrees to act as a security guard for her when Lois, who fears that the serial killer Grotesquerie is targeting them, isn’t around.
Unlike her mother, Merritt is suspicious of Eddie. Sensing the frisky energy between them, she asks aloud if the two are sleeping together. Then, she wonders if her mother is just trying to keep tabs on her. “You have to spy on me and report back,” Merritt says to Eddie accusingly.
I actually think Merritt is right about that. Eddie does have to spy and report back, but not to her mother. My theory, at the moment, is that Eddie is getting close to Lois and Merritt because he’s working for Lesley Manville’s Nurse Redd, who is desperate to prove that Lois is an unfit spouse so she can gain power of attorney over her husband’s care. Sending in a handsome, caring football player recovering alcoholic to gather intel seems like exactly the sort of move she would make. It also leaves room for Kelce to have some type of heel turn later this season, which will tell us whether he can take his acting into darker places.
Come on: You didn’t think Ryan Murphy, a man who’s never met a story too sexualized or gruesome to put on television, would hire the BF of America’s Sweetheart just to have him play a nice guy, did you?
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