Hannah Waddingham on Aussie fans, Eurovision and why she’s not ready to farewell Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham reveals why she’s not ready to hang up her Louboutins and her extreme fan encounters in Australia.
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When Hannah Waddingham came to Australia to shoot The Fall Guy earlier this year, she naively thought she might be getting some respite from the Ted Lasso mayhem that has dominated her life for the past two and a half years.
She should have known better.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been recognised in a country as much as Australia,” she says with a laugh over Zoom call from Los Angeles, where she is gearing up for the release of the Season 3 of the Emmy Award-winning comedy.
“I hadn’t prepared myself for that. I figured, because it was the other side of the world, maybe Ted Lasso hadn’t reached there, which is, I know, the most ridiculous thing to say.”
The statuesque blonde spent decades in musical theatre before becoming an instant hit with critics and audiences in her role as Rebecca Welton, for which she won an Emmy in 2021. The original premise of the show saw the immaculately turned-out boss of struggling English soccer club AFC Richmond originally hiring creator Jason Sudeikis’ titular Ted Lasso as an act of revenge against her sleazy former husband in the hope that the rookie American would destroy the club.
Lasso, with his hilarious homilies and irrepressibly upbeat nature, first won over his players then his boss, helping her to share her vulnerabilities and insecurities by exposing his own, leading to a formidable professional and personal partnership that has played out over the two seasons so far.
Fans around the world, including, it seems, on the streets of Sydney, have embraced Rebecca for her mix of steeliness and sensitivity, as she fiercely protects and promotes her people in the male dominated world of sport. While filming The Fall Guy alongside Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, or showing her daughter Kitty the sights, Waddingham was routinely bailed up by complete strangers professing their love and admiration for her fictional alter-ego.
“I’d be walking along the street, going to do some shopping and suddenly there’d be an arm around me like ‘oh my god, Rebecca, you’re me – I got divorced last year and I’m the CEO of a company and people don’t think I could be vulnerable and be a boss’,” she recalls. “Literally, while I’m walking along the street, it was brilliant.”
Waddingham says that many of her fan interactions have made clear to her just how much the show has meant to so many. The first season was released in August 2020 and its uplifting, affirming humour served as a salve to many who were deep in Covid-induced lockdowns and feeling disconnected and helpless.
“I spoke to Sudeikis while I was out in Australia quite a lot, and I just said to him, ‘Do you know how beloved our-slash-your show is in Australia?’ I had no idea. And that was the main thrust in general – people, as they do everywhere, saying ‘Do you have any idea how much this got our family through a difficult time in our lives when we were all kind of holed up together’. It was something the whole family could watch and it kind of unified everybody.”
While the success of Ted Lasso has given Waddingham professional opportunities that she had never dreamt of, it’s the people involved she treasures the most. She describes Sudeikis as an “immense talent” and she’s particularly grateful that the show has also thrown her together with Juno Temple, who plays Rebecca’s BFF, model turned PR maven, Keeley. The friendship that has developed between the two remains one of the highlights of Ted Lasso and Waddingham believes their genuine, mutually supportive screen relationship is the greatest since Thelma and Louise.
“I always say to people – and I know she would say the same thing – if you think that Keeley and Rebecca’s relationship is strong, it doesn’t touch myself and Juno,” she says. “I’ve never had that thing of literally knowing someone and falling in love with them on the spot when I met them, like I did with Juno.”
There has been much speculation, fuelled by Sudeikis, that this season of Ted Lasso will be the last. Waddingham says she genuinely has no idea whether that’s the case but says that “this is the end of a triptych of a storyline”. She hopes there’s more to come – “I’m not ready to hang up my Louboutins yet” – but says that knowing it could be the last time she walks in those towering heels sometimes made the recent shoot a slightly bittersweet one.
“Horrendously so,” she says, adding that she and Brett Goldstein, who plays the gruff, sweary, player-turned coach Roy Kent, “were trying to not be melancholy a couple of episodes in”.
“You just think ‘no, enjoy it for God’s sake’. But things that really matter to you, you do start worrying about them leaving your life. I know that these people will be in my life, however present or peripheral, for the rest of my life. But to not walk alongside Rebecca … I am not ready to cope with that yet.”
Despite her burgeoning screen success and the fact that she’s barely appeared on stage in more than a decade, Waddington says the theatre is still “100 per cent my home”. Having been nominated three times for an Oliver Award – for Spamalot, Kiss Me Kate and A Little Night Music – she’s promised to “dust off the pipes” again when she hosts the prestigious UK theatre celebration next month.
“It’s like a proper deep breath and coming to my full size,” she says of being on stage. “Everything’s quite contained on screen, which I sometimes struggle with.”
Her background on London’s West End also gave her deep love of the Eurovision Song Contest – “everyone in theatre is obsessed with Eurovision” so she was thrilled to be asked to be a presenter for this year’s semi-final and final, which will be held in May in Liverpool, standing in for war-torn Ukraine.
“I love the high campery of it all,” she says. “I love the sense of theatre of it all. And this year, more than any year, what an amazing time to be part of it when we’re hosting it for the Ukrainian people. So I was into it from the word go and I really look forward to standing next to Julia (Sanina) the Ukrainian presenter and offering up some boss bitch vibes in the flesh.”
She’s fascinated to hear that Australia’s entry this year has already been decided, and even more delighted to discover that it’s a synth-metal band from Perth called Voyager that will be flying the flag for the land Down Under. And for those who continue to question whether Australia has any right to be in the beloved Euro-centric completion?
“Bollocks to them,” she says. “And good luck Voyager.”
Ted Lasso Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV+
Originally published as Hannah Waddingham on Aussie fans, Eurovision and why she’s not ready to farewell Ted Lasso
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