Sean McVay turns 40 with a new perspective on football and the same dreams for his Los Angeles Rams

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sean McVay will spend his 40th birthday on Saturday in the exact same way he spent the vast majority of his 30s.

He'll be preparing the Los Angeles Rams to play their hearts out.

“What’s a good birthday? When I’m working on my birthday, and if I’m working next week,” McVay said. “That would be a hell of a birthday. That’s the only present I want.”

This year, he'll be working to get the Rams ready for the NFC championship game on Sunday. If Los Angeles (14-5) beats the Seattle Seahawks (16-3), McVay will open his next decade by preparing to coach in his third Super Bowl — something no one has done at his age.

McVay has been the “youngest” and the “first” to a jaw-dropping number of accomplishments since he took over the Rams as a 30-year-old prodigy. He became the apogee of cerebral, offense-minded coaching while transforming a long-struggling franchise into a winner, and his stature in his profession's hierarchy hasn't really changed in nine years.

As he reaches 40, McVay is still working long hours, innovating constantly and striving to master every facet of this complex game. But after he publicly considered walking away from coaching several years ago, the father of two young sons also says he has developed a more nuanced perspective about what football really means — and what coaching truly is.

“I’ve had a lot of growing up to do since nine years ago when we first got here,” McVay said. “Over the last couple of years, and I think through some of the adverse times where you’re really forced to do that reflection, is where the appreciation and joy and the journey come from. It’s not exclusive to just the trophies. Those are all fleeting. The other things last a lot longer, and I think it keeps your cup full when that’s really where your intrinsic motivation comes from.

"Because if it’s just about the other stuff, I think that’s too shallow.”

McVay has already summitted nearly every coaching mountaintop, and he was almost always the first to reach each peak.

He became an offensive coordinator at 27 in Washington. He was the youngest head coach in the Super Bowl era when the Rams hired him in 2017, and he immediately led them to their first playoff berth in 13 years.

At 33, McVay became the youngest head coach to reach the Super Bowl.

At 36, he became the youngest coach to win the Super Bowl.

At 39 last week in Chicago, McVay claimed his 10th playoff victory — the most by any coach under 40, and the same number as Bill Walsh and George Seifert managed in their entire careers.

With Mike Tomlin's departure from Pittsburgh and Sean McDermott's firing by Buffalo this month, McVay is now the second longest-tenured coach in the entire NFL, behind only Kansas City's Andy Reid.

While his year-to-year results have been outstanding — eight winning seasons, seven playoff berths, four NFC West titles and those two Super Bowl runs — McVay says he takes more pride in his evolution as a leader than in his steady success on the field.

“What I think about the most is the appreciation for when I haven’t been at my best, but the unconditional support that I felt,” McVay said. “That means a whole hell of a lot to me. (There were) moments I’ve been open about where I wasn’t the leader, I wasn’t the man or the coach that I wanted to be on a consistent basis. I’m not by any stretch saying that I’ve got it all figured out. But I’m better than what I once was, and it’s only because I’m around people, and I have family and friends and people in this building, that make you want to do better.”

McVay needed that maturity to thrive during a tumultuous 2025.

He started last January coaching the Rams through two playoff games amid the chaos caused by the Southern California wildfires near their training complex. He began the new season by tearing his plantar fascia on the sideline in Week 2 while running to speak to an official.

The Rams rolled to an 11-3 start before a late slump knocked them out of the No. 1 seed in the NFC. But after two gritty playoff wins, McVay's team could become only the sixth in NFL history to win three straight postseason games in road stadiums.

Amid all of this work excitement, McVay and his wife, Veronika, then expanded their family last month with the birth of Christian McVay, their second son in just over two years. The erstwhile workaholic loves parenthood, both for its new viewpoint on life and for the way it bonds him with friends and colleagues.

“It’s been fun to watch him become a father of two,” said quarterback Matthew Stafford, who has four kids of his own. “I was FaceTiming my girls in the meeting room (Friday) morning, and he’s asking (youngest daughter) Tyler if her tooth is still loose. It’s a really cool, unique relationship, and one that I don’t take for granted.”

Even with a new noisemaker in his house, McVay has become a convert to the importance of sleep, getting at least seven hours every night after spending years in the performative sleep droughts so often flaunted by football coaches.

It's only the latest signal that McVay is growing and maturing. He’s no longer younger than any of his players, and he isn't the youngest head coach in the NFL after he spent a whopping seven seasons holding that title.

But as anyone can see on the Rams' sideline each week, McVay remains a ferocious competitor and a football obsessive who's grateful to be working instead of blowing out candles.

“I'm not a big birthday guy,” McVay said with a broad grin. “And if you guys say, ‘Happy 40th,’ I'll slap the (expletive) out of you."

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Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay talks to reporters following an overtime victory over the Chicago Bears NFL football divisional playoff game Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay runs drills during practice at the team's training facility Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Los Angeles, ahead of the NFL football NFC Championship game against the Seattle Seahawks. (AP Photo/Caroline Brehman)

Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay speaks during a news conference at the team's training facility Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Los Angeles, ahead of the NFL football NFC Championship game against the Seattle Seahawks. (AP Photo/Caroline Brehman)

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — The Sundance Film Festival is in full swing, with Channing Tatum, Olivia Wilde and Charli xcx movies premiering back-to-back at the storied Eccles Theatre on Friday evening in Park City. Considered some of the hottest tickets at the festival, the waitlists are already long, and the lines will surely be longer.

First up was “Josephine,” writer-director Beth De Araújo’s raw drama about an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) whose life and sense of safety is upended after she witnesses a sexual assault in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Tatum and Gemma Chan play the parents who are unsure how to help her navigate these new emotions and fears. The film, which is part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition, is based on De Araújo’s own experience of seeing something scarring at that age.

There wasn’t a seat to spare, and over 400 people on the waitlist were unable to get in. Afterward the crowd gave a long standing ovation as the filmmaker and actors came onstage for a Q&A.

Araújo discovered Reeves at a San Francisco farmer's market, where she told her mother she was casting for someone to play Tatum and Chan's daughter.

Reeves said one of her favorite parts of the film was a scene in which she and Tatum eat a jelly doughnut.

“I only ate the outside and fed the jelly part to him,” Reeves said.

Tatum chimed in: “That is true.”

The next film, Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” will bring a distinct change in tone to the Eccles. It’s the story of a college graduate in his early 20s (played by Cooper Hoffman ) who gets his first job as a kind of intern/assistant to a renowned art world provocateur named Erika Tracy (Wilde), who Arkai described as “bold, daring and very controversial,” a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna.

“It’s the story of their affairs and the impact it has on this kid’s life and how it kind of turns his whole world upside down,” Araki told The Associated Press. “It’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s sexy. And it’s a ride.”

It’s a film that Araki has been working on for over 10 years, as it evolved from a comic “Fifty Shades of Grey” with a female intern to what it is now.

“After #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, all the stuff that was going on, it was literally like, I don’t really want to see a woman getting dragged around by the hair,” Araki said. “I don’t want to seed that kind of patriarchal dynamic, even if it’s consensual.”

Flipping the gender roles and making the young intern a man made the movie more interesting for Araki, “as a filmmaker who has always been heavily influenced by feminist film theory and feminism in general,” he said.

At the same time, he was absorbing news stories about Gen Z and how they don’t have sex or relationships anymore and a new dynamic emerged.

“What I knew as an old person, as an old-timer, in terms of socialization, dating, sex, all of this stuff that seemed to be kind of falling away,” Araki said. “And so that kind of became a major theme of the movie.”

Things Wilde’s character says are things he has also said in interviews about sex and sexuality. Her character gets into generational debates about it. And ultimately it's sex positive.

“It was very important to me to make something sex positive,” Araki said. “’I Want Your Sex’ is like the opposite of ‘Babygirl,’ which I found to be very sex negative.”

The film also features a supporting turn from Charli xcx, who was a fan of Araki and whose “Brat” album cover was partially inspired by the title credits to his film “Smiley Face.” When she heard about this new movie, he said, she asked if she could be in it. He was interested, but told her agent that she needed to do a self-tape “like everyone else” to play the part of Hoffman’s girlfriend.

“The character is not her. That’s what’s so fun,” he said. “She’s American, she’s super uptight and kind of pill.”

She filmed her scenes in one day, on a two-day break in the middle of her Brat tour.

“I don’t want to give it away, but she’s in one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie where her and Cooper’s character are having kind of bad sex,” he said.

Those who stick around at the Eccles after “I Want Your Sex” will get a Charli xcx double feature, with the world premiere of her self-referential mockumentary “The Moment,” about a rising pop star, before it hits theaters on Jan. 30.

Earlier Friday the world premiere of William David Caballero's mixed-media film “TheyDream” immersed viewers in the intimate story of a Puerto Rican family learning to process grief through art. Caballero and cowriter Elaine Del Valle have screened short films at Sundance in the past but were honored to bring a full-length feature to the festival.

“Sundance has always been about possibility for me — about artists being given space to take creative risks and tell personal stories,” Del Valle, who is also a producer on the film, told AP. “Bringing our first feature, especially in Sundance's final year in Utah, carries a different weight.”

Associated Press writer Hannah Schoenbaum contributed.

For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival

Pedestrians pass down Main Street before the start of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Channing Tatum, from left, Mason Reeves, and Gemma Chan attend the premiere of "Josephine" during the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, at Eccles Center in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)