Sarah Niles is an English Award winning actress, a veteran stage and theater actress, and the main regular actor and then recurring actress featured in the Apple TV+ series, Ted Lasso who played the character Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, a sport psychologist for AFC Richmond.
History[]
Sarah Niles was born in Thornton Heath, South London, and was the youngest daughter of three to her father an electrician, and her mother a care nurse, both Barbadian arriving to Britain in the late 1950s. She was a drama student at the Manchester School of Theatre, part of the Manchester Metropolitan University.
Career and Awards[]
Shehas appeared mainly in theatre productions including shows at the National Theatre, The Royal Court, The Old Vic and The Bush Theatre. In 2013 and 2014 she worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company as Charmian in Anthony and Cleopatra, performing at Stratford Upon Avon and touring to Miami and The Public Theater New York. In the same year she played Tituba in a sold-out production of The Crucible at the Old Vic, which was streamed to cinemas throughout the UK and internationally. In 2017, she appeared as Carmen in Guillermo Calderón's play B at the Royal Court alongside Paul Kaye, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Danusia Samal.
On screen she is best known for co-starring in the BBC comedy Beautiful People alongside Olivia Colman. She has also had roles in various high-profile comedy television shows, appearing opposite Sharon Horgan and American comedian Rob Delaney in Catastrophe. She recently appeared in Sarah Gavron's award-winning film Rocks, Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You and Netflix’s The Sandman. Previously, she appeared in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, London Boulevard and Austenland.
Ted Lasso[]
She appeared along with Jason Sudeikis in the second season of Ted Lasso, for the latter she won Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series along with the cast of the series, and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2022.
She joined the cast of the unqualified American coaching a London soccer team that also includes Hannah Waddingham, Brendan Hunt, Jeremy Swift, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Phil Dunster and Nick Mohammed.
For British actress Sarah Niles, therapist Sharon Fieldstone on Ted Lasso was one of the toughest roles in her career. The job was in the middle of the pandemic, and the role came to her as she was hoping to do more comedy after her serious work on I May Destroy You as well as a role in a version of Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters set in Nigeria. She admits that she hadn’t watched Ted Lasso before auditioning for it, to prepare for the fact that the second season isn’t as upbeat as the first.
The Hardest Role[]
Instead, it shines light on Ted Lasso's mental health struggles, and Niles plays the therapist who eventually succeeds in breaking through Ted’s optimistic, wisecracking surface and revealing what’s underneath. Niles says she loved her time on the show and that she and Sudeikis worked well together to prepare for the therapy scenes they shared.
“Sharon is probably one of the hardest roles that I’ve played. That stillness, that calmness, and also being that confident, strong character … it’s such a balancing act between allowing her to show that truth and care, and being up against someone who’s über positive and light while not coming across as hard.”
Ted Lasso also places its female characters and their friendships at the forefront of the show, most notably Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca Welton and Juno Temple’s Keeley Jones. (Niles and her co-stars Temple and Waddingham each earned an Emmy nom for best supporting actress in a comedy series.)
Yet these women are very misunderstood at the beginning, and Niles feels the same way about Dr. Fieldstone, who may come across as uptight and unemotional at first: “[Rebecca] appears as this strong, tall woman, and you feel like she’s been a woman that’s been scorned. She is vulnerable, and she is trying to find agency and find her own space. We as women don’t often get the chance to say we’re good at something without feeling that there might be some pushback from that. It was really important to find a place with a character like that, and [Sharon] is perfect. She’s Black, she’s British and she’s on her own. She doesn’t have the loved ones that soften her around the edges.”