After an illustrious musical theatre career, Hannah Waddingham has now firmly established herself in Hollywood, thanks to her role in Ted Lasso. Here, she tells Maybelle Morgan what she’s learned about success
Hannah Waddingham is telling me about the time she was suspended 200ft in the air with Ryan Gosling and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It was for a scene in her new film, The Fall Guy, in which she stars with the two actors, whom she fondly refers to as ‘the boys’.
‘Imagine spending three days with just Ryan and Aaron, up in the air!’ she exclaims, her infectious laugh. ‘Thankfully, I’m quite gung-ho and, unless I feel like I’m going to vomit on the spot, I’ll give things a good go.’
Waddingham spent four months in Sydney last year, filming with Gosling, Taylor-Johnson and Emily Blunt. She only has good things to say of them all. ‘They’re fabulous people,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘I feel like the more established the performers, the less they need to be – for want of a better expression – arseholes. There’s no need for that in life.’
Waddingham has also just wrapped filming a smaller role in the eighth instalment of Mission: Impossible, titled Dead Reckoning Part Two, due to be released in 2025.
Warm and direct, without an ounce of pretence, London-born Waddingham conveys a sense of immediate familiarity. In person, she’s funny and unapologetic, and, as you might guess, she tells it exactly as it is.
Right now, the actor is back in London, animatedly chatting to me over Zoom, fresh from a ‘crazy, whirlwind trip’ to Austin, Texas, where she was doing press for The Fall Guy at SXSW Film & TV Festival. A big-screen reboot of the 1980s TV series, it follows Colt Seavers (Gosling), a past-his-prime stuntman who’s drafted back into action on a mega-budget movie directed by his ex, Jody Moreno (Blunt). Seavers is tasked with saving the day – and may, in the process, rekindle his former romance – by tracking down arrogant movie star Tom Ryder (Taylor-Johnson), who has suddenly disappeared.
Waddingham plays Gail Meyer, a passionate but ruthless Duracell Bunny of a film producer, who calls the shots and pulls a lot of the strings on set. The Fall Guy has all of the potent ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster: pyrotechnics, trained dogs, car chases, fight scenes, with Waddingham in the thick of all the chaos. ‘When I first started on it, I was jetlagged to high heaven,’ she remembers. ‘I’d just shot the end of Ted Lasso, then I nipped up to Wales to shoot the end of Sex Education.’ (Waddingham plays Jackson’s mum, Sofia, in the Netflix series.) ‘And then I flew to Australia, and the following morning I was in a trailer, brainstorming scripts with [director] David Leitch and Ryan Gosling [Gosling is al
