Eli Manning on How That ‘Chad Powers’ Cameo Came About

Eli Manning had one final gift to give to Chad Powers before he fully ceded the character’s fate to star Glen Powell and showrunner Michael Waldron. 

In episode three of Hulu’s Chad Powers, Powell’s Powers enters a game in relief to injured South Georgia Catfish starter Gerry Dougan (Colton Ryan) and carries the team to a last-minute, come-from-behind victory over the University of Mississippi Rebels, colloquially known as Ole Miss. The South Georgia sideline erupts; those on the Ole Miss side had a different reaction.

“(Who) the fuck is that guy?” a surprised, unhappy Eli Manning asks.

Manning, though clearly looking like Eli Manning at his alma mater, is actually not playing Eli Manning — he’s acting as an Ole Miss coach, The Hollywood Reporter is told.

“Omaha let us know, like, ‘Yeah, [Eli] is gonna come visit set, maybe do some press stuff with Glen,’ and we were always saying, ‘We’ve got to do a cameo with him,’” Waldron said. “We knew they were going to be playing Ole Miss — that felt like the right way.”

In the script, the coach character did not swear.

“Obviously, he has one line. I hope it plays as a somewhat shocking line, if you know Eli,” he continued. “He was just so game. That wasn’t what the line was in the script, and we were like, ‘What if you said ‘fuck’?”

The “fuck” he did — literally.

Manning is not the only Easter egg in the scene. Standing next to him with a coach’s headset on is Powell’s own father, Glen Powell Sr.

Chad Powers is an adaptation of a viral 2022 prank from Eli Manning’s ESPN+ series, Eli’s Places, a spinoff of big brother’s Peyton’s Places. In the sketch, the 41-year-old retired New York Giants great goes undercover at Penn State’s annual walk-on tryouts via a wig and facial prostheses/makeup as Chad Powers, a home-schooled, mom-coached quarterback. He looks funny (and way old) and sounds funny, but Chad’s arm is no joke. It the end, Manning and the Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin — the only two in on the gag — reveal Powers’ secret identity.

Somehow that turned into this.

Hulu’s Chad Powers follows disgraced Oregon Ducks quarterback Russ Holliday nearly a decade after he blew the national championship game — and the next eight years of his life. To get back into football, Holliday goes undercover as Chad Powers at the fictitious South Georgia University, which is desperate for a new QB. It’s a good thing his dad works in Hollywood hair and makeup.

Powers’ next victim is Peyton Manning’s old school, the University of Tennessee. This time, Powers, now the consensus QB1, lights up the opposition for 343 yards passing, 75 yards rushing, and four TDs. To recap: Powers just barely eked out a win against Eli’s school — but he absolutely lit up Peyton’s.

“That was my only suggestion to the plot of the show,” Eli Manning joked in a Zoom with THR.

It didn’t go unnoticed.

“Certain times you just gotta swallow your pride and say, ‘This is the best thing for the show,’” Peyton Manning told THR in a separate call. “[Chad Powers] is Eli’s baby, too. Eli helped create this and went for it, so I felt like he had a little more editorial say than I did, probably, in this one.”

Brothers are gonna be brothers.

Read THR’s Aug. 20 Chad Powers cover story featuring Powell, the Mannings, Waldron and more here.