The Fall Guy star Hannah Waddingham unleashes on ‘a-hole’ who inspired her character
Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham reveals why she loved filming The Fall Guy in Australia, and takes aim at the “a-hole” producer who inspired her character.
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Hannah Waddingham says she had an absolute blast filming The Fall Guy in Australia but for all the “crazy, positive energy” she loved so much, there was one local institution she could not abide.
“I am not and never will be down with Vegemite,” the proudly British actor confirms via Zoom call from Los Angeles. “You can most definitely keep that. It’s wrong and it’s no bedfellow to Marmite.”
Salty, brown yeast extracts aside, Waddingham’s time in Sydney last year making the action comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, exceeded her wildest expectations.
Not only did the fact that the big-budget, stunt-heavy production shut down some the city’s best known landmarks – “as the daughter of an opera singer, to be shooting on the steps of the Sydney Opera House is pretty cool” – it also introduced her to an entirely new mode of transport.
“I became obsessed with seaplanes,” she says. “I was like ‘oh, that’s a thing is it? Going to a restaurant on a sea plane?.’ With my daughter and then when she went home, I was like ‘maybe I should stop going on really, really dodgy, rickety sea planes to get places when I’m a single mother’. But I loved it. That’s chic, man – landing on the water and going for lunch.”
But one thing she wasn’t prepared for was the level of fandom for her best known character.
After decades of success in musical theatre on the West End and Broadway, Waddingham suddenly became a household name in 2020 thanks to her role as football team owner Rebecca Welton in the global hit comedy Ted Lasso.
The role won her an Emmy in 2021 and legions of fans all around the world, particularly women who admired Rebecca’s mix of steeliness and vulnerability and fiercely loyal female friendships, but if she thought she could get away from it by relocating to the other side of the world for a few months, she was sorely mistaken.
“I thought that I was going to go to Australia and be really anonymous,” she admits. “Who knew how big Ted Lasso is in Australia? It was insane. I genuinely, for the first time ever, had people with cameras jumping out of bushes. At one point I was like ‘I have to have security’. I’m very grateful to all the Aussies that love it.”
As to whether fans have seen the last of Rebecca and the extended family at Richmond FC, she says she’s “open” but clueless. “They would never tell me anything,” she says.
“They’d never tell me anything about a season four because they just know that I would go ‘it’s just us talking isn’t it?’”
The Fall Guy, inspired by the 1980s TV series of the same name, is about Gosling’s movie stuntman, who is lured to Australia to film an over-the-top action blockbuster on the premise of rekindling his romance with its director (Blunt) but actually to help track down it’s narcissistic A-list star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), for whom he is a long-running stand-in.
Waddingham, rocking big glasses, a power pants suit and a wig that she nicknamed “The Badger” plays the movie’s ruthless Hollywood producer Gail, whose already bad behaviour gets worse as the missing star threatens to spiral into a multimillion-dollar disaster. In her 25 years in the business as a singer and actor, Waddingham says that she’s met her fair share of high-maintenance producers, but her increasingly unhinged performance was inspired by one in particular – and she hopes he knows it.
“Towards the end of the movie I was very much using it a bit of a catharsis to exorcise one particular director/producer that I worked with many years ago, this guy, and I really hope he realises that I’m pointing a finger at him for being an a-hole,” she says.
Waddingham says that Gail’s physical appearance was inspired by Fall Guy producer Kelly McCormick, who recently visited Sydney with her husband David Leitch, who directed, and was initially a little uncertain about the wig that she thought made her look like big-haired Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.
“I wasn’t meant to be wigged, and then I feel like they found it/her in a box somewhere and just went ‘yeah, let’s use that’,” Waddingham says with a laugh. “And by the end of the movie you’ll notice that she gets a little fuller because I’ve gone ‘guys can we please put a bit more weft in it?’ So, she’s got a little bit more going on, but at first she did look like roadkill badger.”
Given its background and director – Leitch spent years as Brad Pitt’s body double before getting behind the camera for fight-heavy films including John Wick, Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 – the Fall Guy is very much a love letter to movie stunts and the crazy-brave men and women who perform them.
As such, the experts who executed the many spectacular stunts in the film – including a world record breaking 8 1/2 cannon rolls in a car on Kurnell beach – were held in a particular reverence on set by cast and crew alike like.
Winston Duke had the slightly unenviable and very meta task of playing the stunt co-ordinator on the movie’s fictional blockbuster Metalstorm, and had says he had to trail The Fall Guy’s real stunt co-ordinator Chris O’Hara to get a sense of what the high-stakes job really meant.
“He had to be the calmest person on a set that is always frenetic because there’s a lot happening,” says Duke. “There are explosions, there are things where people can get hurt – people can break their backs or necks – and he had to keep a clear, calm mind through all of it to make sure that he ensured that everyone gets home safely. It’s not just ‘let’s make the shots and let’s make it look cool’. So I watched him a lot.”
Duke, no stranger to intense fight scenes thanks to his role as Wakandan warrior M’Baku in Marvel’s Black Panther movies, says that Leitch’s extremely physical background gave rise to ways of shooting that he had never seen before and says that the director uses stunts as “another film language and a convention for him to tell stories”.
“No one could have told this story and made this movie the way David did,” Duke says. “It has such clear personality, and it’s such a clear conversation that he’s having with the audience. He is advocating for his people and his community. On set, the stuntman really understood the assignment. They made themselves really accessible and available to us. I’ve worked on many stunt oriented movies, and their language is usually physicality, but with the movie like this, they really sat down and talked to us and explained their mindset.”
The Fall Guy is in cinemas next Thursday.
Originally published as The Fall Guy star Hannah Waddingham unleashes on ‘a-hole’ who inspired her character
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