When you think of the pop stars who have been described as “calculated”—either with admiration or antipathy—Taylor Swift is probably the first name that springs to mind. Maybe Beyoncé, too. But let’s not overlook Ed Sheeran, the global superstar who’s written so many hit songs, he made a case for dethroning Lennon/McCartney (however jokingly) in the movie Yesterday.
This is an artist who is on the brink of releasing the final installment in his long-planned sequence of five mathematically themed albums, which began in 2011 with his debut + (Plus) followed by 2014’s x (Multiply), 2017’s ÷ (Divide), 2021’s = (Equals), and this week’s - (Subtract). So, yes, the man is quite literally calculated.
Sheeran, 32, tends to give off an air of normie nonchalance; he’s charming, smiley, and seems like a guy you’d want to grab a pint with at the pub he owns in London. But as we learn in The Sum of It All, the four-part docuseries about Sheeran that premieres today on Disney+, he always planned to be a star, even when every record exec counted him out, and was meticulous about every aspect of his career. The nuances of his unlikely road to superstardom are mercifully breezed through here—there’s nothing more annoying than slogging through a Wikipedia-esque recap of a major pop star’s rise to fame—and we learn quickly that he is astonishingly self-assured and confident, onstage and off. Calculated, you might say.
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That probably makes it sound like The Sum of It All is a trite underdog story about the stuttering, beatboxing Brit who took over the music world with a guitar and a loop pedal—and if that were the case, it would be a total bore that wouldn’t merit going past the first episode. What makes this one interesting and ultimately watchable, however, is that it’s a docuseries about a controlling, dominating pop star completely unraveling.
Originally conceived as a documentary about the making of his fifth album, Subtract, which arrives this Friday, The Sum of It All ends up capturing Sheeran in the aftermath of a tumultuous time in his personal life. In early 2022, his wife, Cherry Seaborn, was diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant with their second daughter; he was involved in a plagiarism lawsuit over “Shape of You” (which he ended up winning); and, tragically, his best friend Jamal Edwards died that February at the age of 31 after suffering a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by cocaine use.
Edwards’ death looms large over The Sum of It All. At times, it feels like it’s as much a story about him as it is about Sheeran. We see the musician visit a mural of his late friend, eat at his favorite restaurant, film a music video at Stamford Bridge for a tribute song, embrace Edwards’ family at a memorial service on the anniversary of his death, and reflect on how grief forced him to grow up. We also see Sheeran cry—a lot. At one point, Seaborn talks about how she’s never seen her husband cry onstage before and to see him crying at all is pretty rare. Not in this doc, though—in one pivotal scene, we see him break down into tears at an intimate concert at London’s Union Chapel while introducing a song he wrote about Edwards. When asked about it a few days later, Sheeran berates himself: “I felt embarrassed because… my job is to be an entertainer and I didn’t feel like an entertainer that night. I felt like just a man.”
It’s not just that he was embarrassed, but, as his wife points out, he’d been burying himself in his work and shooting 14 music videos in a row for Subtract instead of taking the time to process his grief. Seaborn’s insight and involvement in this series is key, and it’s also notably rare and unexpected. She and Sheeran have kept a super low profile as a couple throughout their entire relationship—he describes their marriage as “the most amazing thing in my life that nobody really knows about.” As it turns out, it was also the very impetus for this documentary: Seaborn says that after being diagnosed with cancer and confronting her own mortality, she wondered what kind of mark she would leave on the world.
“I was saying to Ed, I’d never have agreed to do anything like this before—never, ever, ever—but it made me think this whole year, if I died, what’s people’s perception of me?” she says. “What am I going to leave behind?”
Sheeran, she says, wondered the same thing: “He wants to say to people, ‘I’m not just this music machine. I’m not just this robot that has to get to number one.’”
To that end, the doc succeeds in letting us see Sheeran during those moments he calls embarrassing but are actually wholly humanizing; when he’s “failing” at his job by being a person instead of an entertainer. He doesn’t seem to do so happily or comfortably, though, and he seesaws back and forth between being proud of himself for writing songs about his deepest, darkest thoughts on Subtract and worrying about them connecting with his massive fanbase, who are more used to him churning out loved-up ballads like “Perfect” or radio-friendly bops like “Shape of You.”
As he describes, after those life-altering events of early 2022, his album started to change by getting, well, pretty freakin’ bleak. At first he says he doesn’t care if people like the end result, but he later contradicts himself, pointing out that his career as a professional, touring musician is entirely dependent on whether people like it or not. He can’t keep chasing another “Shape of You,” he says, or another Divide Tour, which he describes as the “peak” of his career. (The 2017-19 run set records as the highest-grossing concert tour ever.) And he’s probably right—he won’t score number ones forever (though whether he admits it or not, it seems like he’s still trying; you don’t get hitmakers like Max Martin or dance wunderkind Fred Again involved on your album if you don’t want a smash record).
So, maybe Sheeran really doesn’t care about how well Subtract will do because he’s got his wife, his two daughters, and his idyllic home in Suffolk to buoy him against any commercial or critical disappointment. Or, maybe trying to convince us there’s more to his life than being a “music machine” is all part of his grand calculation.
The latter train of thought is the much more cynical one—and savvy viewers will point out that the timing of this docuseries auspiciously coincides with another high-profile court case against him (this time, he’s been accused of ripping off Marvin Gaye) and does much to make him extremely likable. And yet, no matter how cynical you choose to be, The Sum of It All manages to pack a surprising emotional punch as we watch a superstar work through love, loss, and loneliness—in other words, being “just a man” for once.
