Hannah Waddingham clears her throat, her voice a little scratchy. Two days before this interview, the Ted Lasso star hosted Saturday Night Live UK, performing in nearly every sketch—from a skit about two top-heavy drama teachers named Janet to a musical number about wine consumption. In her opening monologue, she zipped through accents and impressions. “You see?” she told the cheering crowd. “Range! Range.”
We meet in a hidden private dining room of a London hotel, where Waddingham, born and raised in the city, still lives with her young daughter. When she walks through the lobby, people notice her: tall, striking, wearing a pulled-down baseball cap. During lockdown, Ted Lasso—the amiable football series where she plays Rebecca Welton, owner of fictional AFC Richmond—made her famous on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2021, it won her an Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series. At 47, after a long but unflashy career on stage and screen, her time had come.
Initial impressions and misconceptions
I tell her cheerfully that for years I thought she was northern. “No, really?” she replies gamely. “Well, my mum was from the Isle of Man, so there’s probably that.” I expand my theory: she has northern energy, like a barmaid at the Rovers Return. “Oh my God,” she says, laughing, though the air chills. “Is that a compliment? I don’t think so.” I dig myself deeper, mentioning her brassy campness. “It’s switch-on-able and switch-off-able,” she says. “It’s just wanting to make people smile and laugh.”
Now 51, Waddingham is in her Hollywood era. She has starred in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning with Tom Cruise and The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. She is here to discuss Ted Lasso’s return and her new series, Ride or Die, a comedy-drama caper co-starring Octavia Spencer. Waddingham plays an undercover assassin who loves drinking and men; in the first episode, she jumps out of a first-floor window to avoid giving her number to a barman.
At lunch, she orders the shrimp cocktail. “That is very camp,” I joke. “Is it? I just like shrimp.” She switches to tomato and burrata salad. Having watched her co-present Eurovision 2023, read about her musical theatre years, seen her as a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and her theatrical Christmas special for Apple TV, it’s easy to make assumptions. “Trust me, I would be very bored of myself if I were perpetually camp,” she says. She finds the label reductive. “Even my monologue from the other night was trying to create something that is light and joyful.” When I mention her judging the Rusical on Drag Race, she counters: “From musical theatre. What I’m saying is, it signs me off to say that I’m camp, or that I’m a northern barmaid.”
I feel I’ve insulted her. “There’s just a lot more to me than that,” she says. “We’re all the sum of different parts.”
From theatre to global fame
Waddingham grew up among creative people. Her first jobs were in theatre. After years of grafting—small TV roles while performing in the West End and Broadway—she had breakthrough screen roles: the “shame nun” Septa Unella in Game of Thrones, a parent on Sex Education, and then, during Covid, Ted Lasso. Her character Rebecca takes over AFC Richmond as part of a divorce settlement with her cheating husband Rupert (the late Anthony Head). In Season 1, she sets out to destroy the club by hiring inept American football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis). Over three seasons, he grows into the job, and she grows to love the game.
Now, the show returns for a fourth season, three years later, with a women’s football team at its centre. Was Waddingham surprised? “There were always rumblings. We finished with Keeley handing Rebecca the women’s team, so I thought it would come around quicker. When it didn’t, you start to think, is that it?” The cast remain “thick as thieves”, but she felt sad about possibly never playing Rebecca again. “Losing a character is like losing a friend.”
She follows women’s football more than men’s. Karen Carney messaged her before SNL to wish her luck. She met Lionesses Leah Williamson and Jill Scott early in Ted Lasso. “They are such pioneers for my daughter’s generation.” Her father, in his mid-80s, also prefers women’s football. Discussing hostility toward female players, she recalls being out with Mary Earps, who faced backlash over her autobiography. “My jaw was on the floor. I had a level of incredulity that she found funny.”
Calling out misogyny
Waddingham has a no-nonsense way about her. In a 2023 Glamour interview, she discussed modelling in her 20s and calling out misogyny. In 2024, while hosting the Olivier Awards, a paparazzo asked her to “show leg.” Her response went viral: “Oh my god, you’d never say that to a man, my friend. Don’t be a dick, otherwise I’ll move off.” People saw it as a stand against sexist double standards. But when I bring it up, she is wary. “I know where you’re going with this.”
She explains she has known the photographer for 20 years and respects him. “He took it on the chin, I called him out, he emailed me, I emailed him back. I was like, ‘Dude, that’s not cool,’ and fair play to him, he was apologetic.” She clarifies: “I think he forgot himself. There was an overfamiliarity. I just thought, don’t do that, because this is a bespoke Marchesa gown. It stopped on the mid-thigh, and it had a beautiful, diaphanous over-layer.” Her sadness was that the evening had been reduced to that incident, rather than her live performance, “which is one of the greatest achievements of my life.” The others, she says, are the birth of her daughter, being a single mother, her Christmas special, “and how I hold myself, for younger women. The flip side of that is calling out moments that need to be shut down.”
Good manners are important to her. “Manners first, always. I’m always mindful that my daughter is watching. So I try to be elegant and have a firm kindness about myself.” She pauses. “I’m just aware that we’re not talking about my work as much as my conduct.”
When I explain I’m trying to find out who she is, she nods. “Purposefully so. It’s easy to get caught up in—oh, I call people out. Yes, I do, and I’m proud of that. We, as the females in society, us older ones, we need to encourage the younger ones, to make sure that we are respected, because it’s too easy for us to just take it on the chin.”
Early life and theatre roots
Waddingham grew up in Wandsworth, south-west London. Her father was a marketing director and special constable in the river police. Her mother, Melodie Kelly, was a professional opera singer who took 11 years off to raise Waddingham and her brother, then returned to the chorus at the English National Opera. “Which is why I wanted to film my Christmas special there,” Waddingham says. “Apple were saying, ‘Do it at Radio City Music Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall.’ I said, ‘No, it can only be the London Coliseum, because I’ve run around there since I was a little girl.’”
She doesn’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. Obsessed with Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald, she wanted to be the singer people listened to on their Walkmans. She auditioned for drama school two roads from her childhood home and still lives in south-west London. “I have a big thing about being around my parents until I don’t have them.” Her mother died two Christmases ago. “I don’t mind getting upset, because it is the love that you feel for someone, still.”
Her mother’s name was Melodie Kelly. “I think her parents called her Melodie because of their love of music, and now I hear my daughter singing in the shower, naturally operatic, and I think the gene pool is alive and kicking.”
Motherhood and career balance
Waddingham gave birth to her daughter just weeks before filming the “Shame!” scene in Game of Thrones. She had made her West End debut in 1998 and taken small TV roles. She auditioned for Septa Unella to be seen by show runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, though she didn’t expect to get it. “I was eight months pregnant. Pregnant from the nose out!” She planned to take time off, but the show was “a juggernaut.” She took her nine-week-old daughter on set. During the walk of shame scene, she could hear the baby crying. “And I just thought, oh my God, what am I doing? Part of me was working, providing for my family. The other part was going, I’ve got terrible separation anxiety. So when I watch it back, I just see a woman who doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.”
She split from her daughter’s father, Italian luxury hotel manager Gianluca Cugnetto, when her daughter was small (now 11) and has been a single parent since. At the 2024 Screen Actors Guild Awards, she carried a cardboard handbag painted in rainbow colours with “Epic” on top—made by her daughter. “I picked it up and went, ‘It’s actually got more space in it than a normal, designer, ridiculous handbag, so I’m going to take it up the red carpet.’ I did it on purpose, to show her that she’s never far away from me.” She still feels mummy guilt when away for work. “I’m about to go away to do press for the next season of Ted [Lasso], and the mummy guilt descends. But I have to try and combat it.”
She hasn’t done theatre since the early 2010s, partly due to demanding hours. “I don’t think my daughter is ready.” She wants to commit to eight shows a week for at least six months. “I need to find the time to be able to go, ‘I’m taking this coat off for now and I’m putting my theatre coat back on.’”
Ride or Die and new projects
Waddingham took her daughter to Prague for five months to shoot Ride or Die, enrolling her in an international school. Her character Judith is a forensic accountant whose life is a cover for being a trained assassin. Judith skis, shoots, and loves wine. “She’s an assassin of some 30 years,” Waddingham says. She was asked by co-star Octavia Spencer, whom she calls “my magnificent counterpart.” The series is heavy on action. “I did 75-80% of my own stunts. But, Rebecca, it was partly not a good idea, because I did mangle myself senseless.” At its heart, it’s about female friendship. Spencer plays Judith’s best friend Debbie, who gets roped into the assassin lifestyle. “It’s about calling each other out, holding each other up, and showing that women in their 50s can be all things, when they decide to chop and change.”
Fame came late to Waddingham. “An overnight success after 25 years is delicious. And I’m fine with it, because I’m very at peace with who I am. I’m more than happy to share that I’m 51 and proud of it.”
She looks at her phone and panics. We’ve been talking almost 90 minutes instead of 45. “I hope I’ve improved your initial …” she says with a laugh. I assure her I’m a big fan of camp. “I’m a big fan of camp as well,” she says. “But I like these profiles, because it’s important for people to see that, as with anyone else, there’s light and there’s shade.” She rushes off to her daughter’s school event. “I’m always conscious that with her school, if I’m late, they’re going to think, oh, bloody actors …”
