The man you see above is named Brett Goldstein, British actor, writer, and comedian. He’s appeared in numerous films and television shows in the United Kingdom, and he’s gotten a major boost in profile from his work on Apple’s Ted Lasso, where he plays lovably gruff football star Roy Kent. Goldstein is also a member of the Ted Lasso writing staff; in fact, he wrote last week’s episode, “The Signal.”

Or did he?

According to one of the stranger conspiracy theories spreading on the internet this summer — and that’s really saying something — Goldstein is not a real person at all. Instead, he is a CGI creation who has been digitally inserted into Ted Lasso using, I don’t know, computers or witchcraft or something. It sounds made up, but in the last week or so, it’s become a thing.

“Roy is a cgi character right?” one skeptical viewer wrote on Reddit. “I can’t unsee it. I’m positive apple is gonna unveil something at some point that they were trying to trick us with his CGI.” To which another Reddit user responded “yes dude!”

See some of the madness for yourself below:

Bowing to pressure (or perhaps waiting until his programmers could animate an appropriate response?) Goldstein himself has finally weighed in with a video on his official Twitter account. In it, the “real” Goldstein insists he is “a completely real, normal, human man, who just happens to live in a VFX house and does normal, human, basic things like rendering and buffering and transferring data.”

Well that should definitely resolve the matter once and for all. Brett Goldstein is a real, human man. That voice he uses to play Roy Kent, though, is definitely fake. And possibly made by a computer.

New episodes of Ted Lasso, starring “Brett Goldstein,” premiere on Apple TV+ on Fridays.

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