The Ted Lasso star Keeley Hazell, who is also a staff writer on the hit comedy series, has spoken about her history as a model for lads’ mags including Nuts and FHM, and how it left her feeling “voiceless”.

Hazell, who played football club owner Rupert Mannion’s trophy wife Bex, is performing at next month’s Edinburgh Fringe with a show inspired by her past, and her 2025 memoir Everyone’s Seen My Tits: Stories and Reflections from an Unlikely Feminist.

She told The Guardian that there was “excitement” to her earlier career “but also a lot of shame and embarrassment,” adding: “Topless modelling never really aligned with me as a person.”

The book and her new show, then, sees Hazell giving herself “a voice … [for] a period where I felt voiceless”.

Hazell found fame as a teenager in 2003, after winning The Daily Star’s “beach babe” competition. She rapidly built a career as a topless model from there, gracing the covers of FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, among others, before transitioning into acting.

“I was so young, there was so much exploitation, I was not emotionally or mentally prepared for it,” she explained. “There was so little protection for women entering that industry. I had no idea about the things I needed in place, and my family didn’t either.”

She added that she’d drink to “enjoy the party” and try to ignore the toxic sides of the industry, and described writing about the selling of a private sex tape to The Sunday Sport as “terrifying”. “So many women experience some aspect of sexual violation and abuse in any realm, the shame for me needed to be ridded.”

Hazell left modelling behind in 2009 and moved to Los Angeles to study acting, before landing roles alongside Felicity Jones in 2011’s Like Crazy and 2014’s Horrible Bosses 2, alongside Jason Sudeikis.

She served as the inspiration for the Ted Lasso character Keeley, a former model turned football club manager, but the role itself was ultimately played by actor Juno Temple. Hazell herself was cast instead as Bex, before becoming a staff writer on the series.

Ted Lasso, which streams on Apple TV, is about to return for its fourth season, after supposedly coming to a close in 2023. The third season concluded with Sudeikis’s titular character returning to the US after three years as the coach of a British men’s football team.

Sudeikis has admitted he needed to make “very difficult” individual phone calls to some of the stars of the earlier seasons, as they were not asked back for season four.

The actor also denied long-standing rumours of a feud with writer and producer Bill Lawrence, who was the Ted Lasso showrunner for two of its three earlier seasons, and specifically that the pair had repeated screaming matches while working on the show.