Brendan Hunt is telling strangers everything he couldn't tell Paul McCartney

Alex McDaniel, For The WinTue, May 5, 2026 at 10:31 AM UTC

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Brendan Hunt is laughing, and I mean really laughing — red-faced, breathless, that could-I-actually-die-from-laughing-too-hard kind of laugh — because I've done the meanest thing you can do to someone who's made a life out of telling stories: I dug up one of the first ones he ever wrote.

And then I read it to him.

"Many people, upon hearing the phrase 'performance art,' picture a semi-naked man walking about a dimly lit stage with highly ethereal music playing in the background as he spouts quasi-philosophical nonsense about the metaphorical relationship between a rainbow trout and the degradation of morals in today's materialistic society. But it's not always like that." (The Daily Vidette, Oct. 12, 1989)

Hunt has no recollection of writing the piece, his second byline for Illinois State University's student newspaper. But he laughs like someone who recognizes the freshman theater major he used to be who would absolutely craft a 54-word lede about a comic who sometimes performed in a diaper.

"That does sound like words I would use, in the order I would use them. Always been fixated on rainbow trout as a comic foil," he says. "But I don't remember ever writing for the paper. That's nuts."

For all he's forgotten, the memories burned into Hunt's brain are vivid. His childhood nickname (Na-Na). White Sox games with his dad. His first kiss. An acid trip in Amsterdam. The birth of his first son. His mom’s laugh.

"She had the best laugh," he says.

And that's why we're here.

I sat down with Hunt before a recent performance of The Movement You Need, his one-man show currently in the home stretch of a three-week run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Named for a half-lyric from "Hey Jude," the show is an 80-minute reckoning with memories tied to his late mother, Martha, and their shared love for the Beatles.

Spanning most of Hunt's life, from growing up in Chicago to performing comedy in Amsterdam before settling his personal and professional life in L.A., the show is funny in the way Hunt is funny: dryly clever, expertly paced, animated when the moment calls for it. It’s also human in the way Hunt is human, not shying away from vulnerability or the harsh reality of loving someone with destructive tendencies.

Brendan Hunt's one-man show, "The Movement You Need," explores his complicated relationship with his mother through the lens of their shared love for the Beatles.

He’s been shaping Movement for years, workshopping it in L.A. and doing short runs in Amsterdam and New York, but this time around has been considerably more demanding: eight shows a week in the city where so much of the material took place, material that requires him to relive some of the best and worst days of his life on stage.

“It's getting a little easier to recover after each one,” Hunt says. “I have to be careful not to let it make things too much easier. … why the show works is that I can get back into these memories and bring people with me. At least I think that's why the show works. I don't know, I'm grasping at straws.”

'No one half-knew her'

Hunt’s earliest memories are of his mother and the Beatles, starting with the night he wandered into the living room as a toddler and found her on the couch watching “Yellow Submarine.” He was about the same age when he first heard “Hey Jude” and believed the “na-nas” were directly referencing his nickname. Hunt, whose parents divorced early in his childhood, immersed himself in all things Beatles, both to satisfy his own obsession and because he knew early on that it was the strongest bond he had with his mother, even throughout her decades-long struggle with alcoholism.

Hunt doesn’t soften her story for the audience. He recalls the bartending shifts she worked while trying to make ends meet, how they undoubtedly contributed to her heavy drinking. There's the night in Amsterdam she was supposed to see his band perform for the first time and arrived so intoxicated she could barely function. At one point, he projects a video he made as an adult for his mom’s intervention, appropriately and heartbreakingly set to a Beatles song.

Hunt knows his mother’s story is complicated, as is the task of relaying a lifetime of critical memories in an 80-minute stage show, but says that level of honesty is critical for conveying who she really was, for better or worse.

"No one half-knew her," he says. "You knew the whole package. Especially how funny she was, and how much she cared about people. But then you couldn't know her and not know that she was also destructive."

'A horrible, horrible evening'

Brendan Hunt's one-man show, "The Movement You Need," explores his complicated relationship with his mother through the lens of their shared love for the Beatles.

There's a scene in the third season of Ted Lasso — the hit Apple TV series Hunt created with Jason Sudeikis, Joe Kelly, and Bill Lawrence — in which Hunt's character, Coach Beard, sits outside a pub with Ted and his young son, Henry, who's navigating his parents' divorce. A busker starts playing "Hey Jude," which excites Henry and prompts Beard to ask why he likes the Beatles.

"'Cause my dad does,” Henry says.

“You know what this song's about?” Beard continues.

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"Someone named Jude," Henry says.

"Not just someone," Beard tells him. "A little boy named Jude. And one day, his mom and dad decided to break up. You know, get divorced. And that made Jude real, real sad." Jude's father had a best friend, Beard explains, and that best friend was worried about Jude and his feelings, which is why he wrote the song. “I know right now it feels like you're in a sad song,” Beard tells Henry. “But you, young man, you have the power to take a sad song and make it better.”

It’s a standout scene in what was rumored to be the final season of Hunt’s Emmy-winning show that somehow found success in the depths of the pandemic. And it hits differently when you remember the man anchoring that scene was once a little boy who loved the Beatles because his mom loved the Beatles, and who probably could have used someone like Beard in his life to reassure him things would be OK.

Instead, he had Paul McCartney, whose surprise show at a Joshua Tree club in 2016 sets up the climax of The Movement You Need. Hunt, who’d won tickets to the show in a radio contest, got a devastating phone call that day about his mom's rapidly declining health.

“It was just a horrible, horrible evening mixed in with what had been a whole day of building up to this dream of seeing Paul McCartney live, in front of three hundred people,” Hunt says. “It's the strangest collision of emotions of a day, hopefully, that I'll ever have. And sometimes that'll pack a slightly harder punch on me (on stage) than I saw coming.”

Hunt finally met McCartney in 2022, nearly six years after his mother died. Though he resisted the urge to devote their brief interaction to unloading a lifetime of memories of his mother and their Beatles obsession, he walked away with a strong premise for what eventually became The Movement You Need: a one-man show about everything Hunt wanted to tell McCartney that day, but didn't.

'Chasing her laugh'

In the years between his mother’s death and when he started workshopping Movement, Hunt’s whole life cracked open. In the middle of Ted Lasso’s initial three-season run, he and his now-wife, Shannon Nelson, celebrated the birth of their first son, Sean – a scene Hunt brilliantly weaves into the show in a way I won’t spoil here.

"I've got certain legs up on my own childhood already," Hunt says. "For example, my son is five, and I'm still here. Still with their mother. And that didn't happen for me."

Sean, whose younger brother, Archie, was born in 2024, inherited his dad’s love for the Beatles early, Hunt says. “I think he knew the words to ‘Yellow Submarine’ before he knew the words to anything.”

Hunt doesn’t dwell on what his kids will or won’t remember about him, mainly because he knows he can’t control which pieces they'll choose to carry with them as they grow up. He also knows The Movement You Need is ultimately the result of what he couldn’t let go of if he tried, the story of a mother and son who were irrevocably shaped by demons she couldn’t overcome and forever bound by the music that made them feel less alone.​

“This was this flawed person, and I'm only giving this sliver of her to try to tell this story,” he says. “But this is someone who I love deeply, however complicated it was, and someone who I miss terribly. So this is, in the end, an ode. And it only works if it's truthful.”

Brendan Hunt's one-man show, "The Movement You Need," explores his complicated relationship with his mother through the lens of their shared love for the Beatles.

When I ask for a memory that didn't make it into the show, he tells me about a night when he was 10 years old, pretending to be asleep on a pull-out couch at his mom’s friend's apartment while they were chatting in the kitchen. When the friend joked with Hunt’s mom about sharing a bed after years of being single, she laughed and said, “I think I’ll be alright.”

“THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK!” Hunt shouted from the living room, unaware of the joke, but seizing the opportunity to join in, nonetheless.

"I have never in my life heard her laugh louder or harder than that," he says.

He pauses.

“Chasing her laugh is really what the path of my life has been."

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The Movement You Need runs through Mother's Day, May 10, at Steppenwolf Theatre. Tickets are available at steppenwolf.org.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: Brendan Hunt's one-man show is a love letter to his mom and Paul McCartney

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