How Hannah lassoed the limelight and Baz her dream job
SHAKING her head in disbelief, Hannah Waddingham roars with laughter as she suddenly, aged 46, finds herself at the centre of one of telly’s hottest shows.
And the reason for her mirth? She was recently nominated for a top TV award in Hollywood . . . and won.
‘Isn’t it weird?’ marvels the actress who, like her operasinger mother and maternal grandparents, is classically trained. ‘You can be knocking about in the theatre industry for years; and so often you feel like you’re knocking, knocking, knocking.’
And then Hannah landed the part of Rebecca Welton, owner of a fictional, down- on-theirluck English football club, who hires an aw-shucks American coach Ted Lasso — also the name of the ten-part series — to whip the team into shape.
Since its launch last year, the Apple TV+ show has become a runaway success, winning awards for creator and star Jason Sudeikis (who plays Ted) — and Waddingham.
At the Critics Choice Awards in January, she was named Best Supporting Actress in a comedy series. The show took top honours, too.
And on April 5, Ted Lasso’s in the running for a prestigious Screen Actors Guild comedy ensemble trophy.
WADDINGHAM is listed alongside Sudeikis and castmates including Juno Temple, Annette Badland, Jeremy Swift and Nick mohammed. Plus footballplaying Phil dunster, Brett Goldstein and Toheeb Jimoh.
In the series, Waddingham’s Rebecca — who gets club AFC Richmond in a divorce deal — is humiliated on a regular basis by her verbally abusive former husband, who enjoys parading his increasingly youthful girlfriends in front of her and the tabloids.
What makes the show such enjoyable comfort viewing is the way Sudeikis and his team of award-winning writers (who snared a Writers Guild Award last weekend) allow the characters to develop.
Waddingham’s first scene involved firing the existing manager, who turned up in her office wearing inappropriately adjusted shorts and proceeded to slime her with a stream of casual misogyny. (‘Oh, do you want to get that off that impressive chest of yours?’)
In the scene, Rebecca’s ‘immaculate and glamorous’ but deliberately not showing any cleavage, says Waddingham. She’s a businesswoman, albeit in unfamiliar surroundings, ‘ aware of her own sexuality, being feminine but being strong’.
But that strength, at least to start with, is largely an act — an ‘ice maiden facade of not a hair out of place; as though she is the boss b****, when actually she is lost’, she says.
After more than two decades in musical theatre — in everything from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Beautiful Game to the Lady Of The Lake in Spamalot — Hannah’s triumph in TV feels long overdue.
She signed for mainly U.S. productions shot in the UK — Game Of Thrones, Sex Education, 12 monkeys, Krypton — because she felt mainstream British TV shows were biased against actors from musical theatre. (She insists they can transition perfectly well to the small screen ‘if you ask them to bring it down a bit’.)
Interestingly, her stage experience was one of the things Sudeikis and his team were attracted to when ‘ the little girl from Wandsworth Common’ auditioned.
While the fame that Ted Lasso has roped in for her is welcome — and fun — the most important factor is that the show is filmed in the UK (in London’s Richmond and at studios and a football ground in middlesex).
This means she can be close to her six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, whom she lovingly refers to as Sausage Face. (She won’t reveal her real name, though she did get a nickname check in her mum’s Critics Choice speech.)
HER child was taken ‘desperately ill’ when Waddingham was filming Krypton in Belfast ‘ and I couldn’t get back to her’.
So she informed her agents in London and LA that ‘I cannot have a moment, ever again, where I can’t get back to my child. She’s my priority’.
Luckily, ‘ Sausage Face’ is better now (it was a kidney complaint), Waddingham tells me over Zoom, from the set of season two of Ted Lasso.
Her devotion is understandable. For a long time she thought she couldn’t have children, but then fell pregnant at 39, after going down the ‘Eastern herbal route’.
Getting the Ted Lasso role ‘was like the universe going, “You’ve done your hard grafting, you’ve done your running around . . . here you go: you can have both.” ’