Will Ferrell Talks The Hawk at New Heights Live Show
will ferrell joined Jason and Travis Kelce on Monday night at the New Heights live show in Los Angeles, using the Orpheum Theatre stop to talk about The Hawk and a 20-year span of sports comedy that began with Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The appearance also gave the Kelce brothers’ podcast event a larger entertainment draw while New Heights heads toward its fifth season in September.
Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles
The live show took over downtown L.A.’s Orpheum Theatre and brought in Alex Morgan, Kelley O’Hara, Myles Garrett and Andrew Whitworth as part of the event lineup. Ferrell’s segment turned the night toward his next project, a 10-episode series for Netflix in which he plays Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, an aging golfer trying to stage a comeback.
Ferrell said the project grew out of a long-running comfort with sports material. “loved playing sports, I loved being on a team, and it led to loving working in film, working on an ensemble show like Saturday Night Live, where it’s all about teamwork,” he said, adding that he once thought he would become a sportscaster before switching to comedy. That background shaped the way he described The Hawk as a chance to work in a sports lane he felt had not been done the same way before.
The Hawk and Netflix
Ferrell called the series “a great opportunity to kind of send up golf and the PGA in a way that hadn’t really been done before,” and said, “Netflix just kind of let us make a very fun old-school comedy, with horribly unredeemable characters.” For viewers, that signals a straight-ahead comedy built around a golf world rather than a broader sports satire, with Ferrell clearly leaning back into the character type that made Talladega Nights a benchmark.
Ferrell also used the stage for lighter material, including jokes about dressing up for NHL games, enjoying Hollywood celebrity tour buses, and his preferred Los Angeles food stops, naming In-N-Out, Burger She Wrote, Holbox and La Escuela. “I love pulling up to one of those, taking off my sunglasses, and just being like, ‘Hey, see anyone famous yet?’” he said. “It’s all lies, everything he says to you. Madonna does not live there.”
September for New Heights
The Kelce brothers now head into September with New Heights’ fifth season tied to the start of the NFL season, and the Los Angeles live show showed how the podcast is expanding beyond football without losing its core audience. Jason Kelce’s closing aside about his lifelong dream to dunk fit the night’s tone: a sports show that keeps finding ways to pull in actors, athletes and league-adjacent curiosity without turning into a generic variety format.
