“Comedy is free speech!” yelled Will Ferrell at the packed premiere for his new Netflix series The Hawk. Animated and clearly energized, Ferrell urged the crowd to tell their friends about the show in hopes of earning a second season.
Ferrell reunites with fellow Saturday Night Live veterans Molly Shannon and Chris Parnell for the 10-episode golf comedy, which is packed with absurd laughs and outrageous antics. But beneath its goofy exterior is an unexpectedly heartfelt story about family, forgiveness, and second chances.
Ferrell stars as Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up golf legend desperate to reclaim the glory he lost two decades earlier. Once at the top of the sport in 2004, Lonnie’s spectacular fall cost him everything, including his marriage to Stacy (Shannon) and, in many ways, his relationship with their son Lance (Jimmy Tatro).
Now, with the world watching, Lonnie is mounting an improbable comeback, chasing golf’s Grand Slam while trying to reconnect with Lance, who followed in his father’s footsteps to become a professional golfer.
Standing in his way is longtime rival Golden Fisk (Luke Wilson), while his unlikely ally is new caddie Sam (Fortune Feimster), who knows almost nothing about golf but is fiercely loyal to Lonnie.
At its core, The Hawk is less about golf than it is about a son longing for the approval of a father who loves him but has never quite figured out how to show it.
It was fitting that Netflix hosted the show’s press day at the breathtaking Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, California, where the final two episodes were filmed as Lonnie makes his last push toward redemption.
Just days before the July 16 premiere Ferrell, Shannon, Wilson, Feimster, and Tatro sat down for interviews and made one thing abundantly clear: making The Hawk was every bit as entertaining as watching it.
My first interview paired Ferrell and Shannon, who both acknowledged that audiences may be surprised by the emotional depth beneath the comedy. As parents themselves, they spoke about drawing from their own experiences to portray two exes navigating the complicated realities of co-parenting.
Ferrell explained Lonnie’s struggles as a father.
“The feeling of parenting is a little bit akin to being on ice skates. You never know but sometimes you have a good feeling about the discussion you just had, or the decision you made. But then other times, you’re like, ‘Was that too much? Was it not enough?’ I think they wrestle with that constantly. More Stacy than Lonnie, you know. He’s a bit of a wild card. He can’t help himself. He has ADHD, and then it comes right back to him.”
For Shannon, Stacy’s complexity made the role especially enjoyable.
“I love performing a scene where I’m like, ‘You gotta win. Here’s what’s gonna happen.’ I really try to manipulate him. That was really fun.”
Stacy is equally driven to grow her beverage brand “Teed Off,” and both actors acknowledged that her ambitions may sometimes outweigh her maternal instincts when it comes to Lance’s success.
Shannon has some questions about her character. “She thinks she’s so much better than Lonnie, but is she?”
One of The Hawk’s biggest strengths is how its comedy grows out of oddly specific character details.
Lonnie, for instance, has an inexplicable love of pickles and white wine. Ferrell laughed while explaining that both quirks originated long before a script even existed.
“We usually start in a general sense of just, even if it’s a joke idea. I said, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to make this make sense, but I want Lonnie to get his hand caught in a pickle jar at some point.’ So then, in an effort to justify that, Lonnie just enjoys a good pickle. So, we reconstructed it to get to that.”
The white wine obsession came just as randomly.
“I was driving around one day, and I was like, ‘Shouldn’t Lonnie just only drink white wine?’ It’s just an interesting choice. It’s not very masculine. It’s very specific. He almost makes it look cool in a weird way,” Ferrell said, mimicking how his character holds a wine glass.
He credits the show’s 10-episode format for giving those quirky choices room to evolve.
“The fact that you have this much real estate, that you have 10 episodes, you get to kind of indulge yourself and make these interesting character choices that can then play on down the road.”
The laughs weren’t limited to the finished series. Ferrell and Shannon admitted they frequently struggled to keep straight faces while filming.
“Will can really make me laugh,” Shannon said.
Ferrell confessed that he often got “the giggles,” especially while working with Feimster.
“There’s one scene where she ferociously, blindly has my back, and she just started yelling at someone, and I was like, ‘We’re both sociopaths. What is happening?’ And we were just cracking up, like, ‘Where did you come up with that?’ I think it was when she called someone a nut boy or something.”
In a separate interview, Tatro, Feimster, and Wilson echoed the same sentiment: making The Hawk was as much fun as it looks.
Tatro, who took his first golf lesson for the role, serves as the perfect straight man opposite Ferrell’s wonderfully unhinged performance and emerges as one of the show’s biggest scene-stealers.
Discussing Lance’s emotional conflict, Tatro said:
“I think for Lance, I kind of just was trying to play it as serious as possible. Lance is not really the funniest guy. He’s never really in on the joke. You have to play those types of characters straightforward. The more serious you are and set on what you’re talking about, then people can laugh at you. Lance isn’t really in on the joke. So you kind of just play it like a drama.”
Feimster said what initially appeared to be another outrageous comedy role ultimately became something much more meaningful.
“When you first start the show, you just kind of see another ridiculous character, like Will’s character, who’s just absurd and does crazy stuff. It was really cool as an actor for them to let my character have this arc of this emotional stuff with Will’s character and with my own personal relationship with my dad on the show. I think that what started to come through is that it’s a real, genuine friendship with Lonnie and Sam.”
Wilson, meanwhile, embraced every aspect of his flamboyant rival Golden Fisk, including dyeing his hair bright blond, a decision that surprised nearly everyone around him.
“Yeah, people thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I’d said at the beginning that I’d like to dye this guy’s hair gold.”
The Hawk delivers exactly what fans expect from a Will Ferrell comedy: big laughs, ridiculous characters, and delightfully offbeat humor.
But its biggest surprise isn’t the comedy; it’s the heart. Beneath the outrageous antics is a genuinely moving story about family, redemption, second chances, and finding your way back to the people who matter most.
This emotional core, combined with Ferrell’s signature brand of absurdity and a cast that clearly relished every minute on set, makes The Hawk every bit as enjoyable to watch as it was to make. If audiences embrace it the way its cast did, they’ll be laughing all the way to a well-deserved second season.
