Dispatch • Owen Wilson, Jason Keller, and the Cast of Apple TV's 'Stick' on the Grief Behind the Golf

When grief surfaces in Stick, nobody meets it head-on. The Apple TV series, which debuted last June and was renewed for a second season, understands how people behave after loss knocks the balance out of their lives.

At a Stick screening and panel in Los Angeles on March 30, the room was loose and funny, but it gently circled back to harder ground: what people do with pain, and how long it can take to let somebody help. Patton Oswalt moderated, joined by creator Jason Keller, Owen Wilson, Marc Maron, Peter Dager, Lilli Kay, and Mariana Treviño.

Created by Keller, Stick follows Pryce Cahill (Wilson), a former professional golfer whose career unraveled after a meltdown went viral, as he takes a chance on Santi Wheeler (Dager), a teenage prodigy. Along with Pryce’s former caddy Mitts (Maron), Santi’s mother Elena (Treviño), and Zero (Kay), a bartender-turned-caddy, they pile into an RV and head out in pursuit of golfing greatness. What begins as a sports comeback story slowly turns into a gentler, more revealing drama about wounded people learning how to support one another.

Keller traced the show’s origin to his own father Ron Keller, a pitcher drafted by the Minnesota Twins. Keller was a kid from Speedway, Indiana, marked early for greatness—but it never arrived. He went on to become a successful businessman instead, though the distance between what life promised and what transpired stayed with his son. “I was always fascinated with sort of how he reconciled that,” Keller added.

That fascination became the basis for Pryce. Keller, whose screenwriting credits include Ford v Ferrari and Mirror Mirror, wrote Stick’s pilot alone, then brought in co-creator Christopher Moynihan to help shape the first season’s writers’ room. But from the start, Keller heard Pryce in Wilson’s voice.

Wilson, for his part, initially couldn’t do the show: he was committed elsewhere when he first read the script. But the material resonated with him. He and Keller kept meeting—breakfast, then lunch a few weeks later—and Wilson kept texting ideas. He recalled reading a book his son gave him on Johan Cruyff, the Dutch soccer great who became a transformative coach at Barcelona.

“I remember texting you going, you know, you ought to try to work some of this stuff in,” Wilson said, referring to Keller. “So we would kind of keep in touch a little bit.”

Eventually, Wilson’s schedule cleared; Keller admitted he hoped that would happen. “All I had in my head was Owen’s voice. I was sort of pretending that this role could go to somebody else, but really was just waiting for all those projects to crash and burn,” he joked.

Maron’s path to the show actually began with a rejection. “I immediately said ‘no,’” he explained. He didn’t know anything about golf; he wasn’t sure about the logistics. But the relationship between the two men at the center of the show drew him back. “I saw them as guys who were profoundly traumatized and in grief over different things,” Maron said. “The idea that these guys were broken guys who don’t specifically communicate about it … I found that to be compelling.” He added that he and Wilson were at an age where the material no longer felt abstract.

Wilson recalled rehearsals in Vancouver, where the cast took part in exercises that felt closer to therapy than traditional preparation. “I remember being moved, even though we didn’t know each other,” he explained. Maron felt similarly. “Jason was like, ‘Well, you guys should see if you can hang out,’” he said of an early dinner in Vancouver. “Right away, it was like, no problem. I’m immediately codependent.”

The trust they built offscreen bled into the work. Maron said the writing kept catching him off guard: scenes he expected to play dry yielded grief. “I was getting choked up every other f—ing scene, man,” Maron said. “My heart was in my throat all the time, and I didn’t have to act that, because it’s on the page.”

Keller summed up the show’s logic: everyone is carrying an emotional burden, and over time that weight hardens. “You can become sort of calcified in whatever you’re carrying until somebody—and it might be a stranger, it might be an old friend—can crack that calcification,” he said. “It can all start to unwind a bit.”

The panel’s most affecting moments came when the conversation widened beyond Pryce and Mitts. Treviño, who plays Elena, spoke about motherhood not as support work for the men around her but as the place where emotional life truly begins. “This is where feeling is born,” she said, describing what it meant to play a Mexican mother trying to hold her family together.

Kay, meanwhile, spoke of the bond between Zero and Santi. She and Dager clicked quickly and their offscreen rhythm shaped a relationship between two young people who feel isolated and unseen, then “find each other and find a lot of joy in each other.” It was one of the clearest statements of what Stick is really after: the moment when someone finally feels less alone.

Dager shared the pressure he felt portraying a golf prodigy onscreen. “I didn’t want to have to ‘act’ confidence,” he said. “It was the one thing I truly was scared of acting.” Practicing obsessively, he felt if he could make his swing feel real, “it could just happen.” Wilson, sitting close by, noted that the small habits—Dager twirling the club between shots the way tour players do—sold the performance as much as any dramatic moment.

Stick, which recently wrapped production on Season 2, isn’t trying to reinvent comedy so much as trace old wounds in warm and winning ways. What gives the show its pull is the sadness underneath. Wilson, working in an understated register that suits him, never pushes Pryce toward easy redemption. The comparisons to Ted Lasso are understandable, but Stick is less buoyant, more bruised—and arguably more resonant for it. By the finale, its real subject isn’t golf but what happens when people finally begin to let someone in.

Stick Season 1 is available to stream on Apple TV.