On Monday, David Beckham and Fisher Stevens joined Vogue global editorial director and Condé Nast chief content officer Anna Wintour and GQ global editorial director Will Welch at the Whitby Hotel in Manhattan for an intimate screening of Beckham, Netflix’s four-part documentary chronicling the soccer superstar’s monumental life and career. The series has countless moments of extraordinary happenstance—from spectacular goals to tabloid oddities—but as it turns out, Beckham’s life is still full of wild coincidences: Following the main event in the Whitby screening room, Beckham and crew coincidentally crossed paths with Roger Federer, who was attending a separate showing for his documentary, Federer: Final Twelve Days, right afterwards. Two legendary sportsmen, their universes briefly colliding. A casual Monday evening.
In a candid conversation moderated by Welch, Beckham and Stevens reflected on some of the documentary’s most poignant moments, from the painful (his 1998 red card; the media circus after Beckham joined Real Madrid) to the triumphant (his redemption in Greece; the Beckhams’ blissful Sunday family dinners, dancing to the Kenny Rogers-Dolly Parton duet “Islands in the Stream”). The process of filming the documentary, Beckham said, proved even more therapeutic than he’d expected.
“It’s not until I’ve walked some of the footage back that I realized how bad it was,” he said. “Part of this process has helped me get over, or process, the things that have happened in my career a little bit better than I have for the last 25 years…It didn’t make me feel any less guilty about that moment, but it helped me understand the amount of stuff that I buried over the last 20 years. I always tell my kids, ‘Make sure you talk to us. If you are worried about something, if you’re concerned about something, something’s upsetting. You talk.’”
On the topic of forgiveness, Stevens mentioned Beckham had told him a story recently—a sign from out of the blue. “We were in a pub in London the other day, and I came out to go back to the house and on the windscreen there was a note,” Beckham recounted. “It didn’t have an address or a name. It just said ‘On behalf of the nation, we’re sorry.’ And that was something."
They also touched on the doc’s viral slice-of-life moments, like David’s impeccably maintained closet and his wife Victoria’s insta-viral childhood anecdote about being driven to school in a Rolls-Royce.
“[Stevens] was so angry with me that day, because this was [Victoria’s] first day of filming,” Beckham recalled. “And I was meant to already be out of the house in the office, but I was actually in the kitchen just making a coffee and I thought, ‘I’m just going to listen to a few minutes.’ So I put the headset on and all of a sudden I heard her say—and I knew where she was going with it. I knew where she was going the moment she said ‘working class.’ I was like, ‘I’ve got you.’ But Fisher wasn’t too happy about it.”
Stevens, meanwhile, recalled thinking, “‘Get him the fuck out of the house! What is he doing here?’ But yeah, it worked out. As soon as my editor and I saw that, we were like, ‘Oh, this is fucking great.’”
After the screening, attendees—among them Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, actor Adrien Brody, Beckham’s former teammate Kyle Martino, former NFL pro Victor Cruz, model Evan Mock, designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla, and New York Jets Tyrod Taylor, Garrett Wilson, and Allen Lazard—gathered for a lively reception upstairs. Stevens’s presence also drew a number of familiar faces from his work on Succession, playing Hugo Baker, Waystar Royco’s wiley communications executive: Nicholas Braun, Juliana Canfield, David Rasche, plus Kieran Culkin and his wife, Jazz Charton, all showed their support.
It was a special opportunity to watch the documentary’s subject and director relive those memories in real time. Sitting on stage, Beckham beamed as he rewatched his own legendary free kick that secured England’s spot in the 2002 World Cup, while Stevens grinned in awe next to him. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it’s still breathtaking.