Hannah Waddingham has no reservations about calling out injustices and mistreatment in the entertainment industry.
This was apparent during an incident before her hosting duties at the Olivier Awards in London where she tore into a photographer who made the misogynistic request to show her legs off for the cameras.
In response, she fired back:
“Oh my god, you’d never say that to a man! Don’t be a d*ck; otherwise, I’ll move on."
"Don’t say: ‘Show them your legs,’ no.”
She promptly walked off, shaking her finger in disapproval. The moment, captured on video, went viral and prompted many on social media to praise Waddingham for her handling of the request to pander to sexist objectification.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the first time Waddingham had experienced such encounters to varying degrees of discomfort, and neither was her polite but firm response.
The 49-year-old Emmy winner and singer, best known for playing sports team manager Rebecca Welton on the beloved Apple TV show Ted Lasso, opened up about dealing with Hollywood sexism and misogyny early in her career in a profile piece for Glamour magazine.
"When it comes to dealing with sexism, especially in my industry, I was on the receiving end of it mostly when I was modeling back in my twenties, with some of the nonsense that misogynistic male photographers would throw at me to put me in my place," she said.
She continued:
"I called them out straight away – and they would then try to fight their corner, but I never let it go; I always called it out – but back then, it was at a time when people didn’t back you up."
"But I know that I’ve always given off an air of: 'I will literally kill you if you treat me like that!'”
“I think it’s important that when you see someone behaving badly, you call them out and batter them over the head with it," she said of her MO, which she learned from her father encouraging her to speak her mind.
Waddingham recalled a situation where she was forced to confront an on-set injustice.
“I had an incident fairly recently where I heard a sound guy on set say something that I didn’t like to someone, so I said, down my microphone in front of everyone: ‘Do you want to repeat that?’”
She continued:
“And then I repeated what he had said to the person."
“He started trying to fluff the situation, so I said: ‘No, if you are going to be the big man, come and say it on this microphone.’"
"They marched him out of the place before he’d even started the gig, and the producers bought the person that he’d been rude to a bottle of champagne with his wages for the night.”
Before she became a breakout star from Ted Lasso, Waddingham was an accomplished stage actor in London who made her West End debut in 1998 and has played many leading roles in various productions, including on Broadway.
However, despite her extensive theatrical credits, Waddingham struggled to have a breakthrough in commercial film and TV shows in her UK hometown, which she found perplexing given that TV and film stars have no problem making the transition to doing stage productions.
She elaborated on the hypocrisy on the Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geistpodcast.
You can watch a sample of the interview, here.
Hannah Waddingham on ‘The Fall Guy’ and impact of ‘Ted Lasso’youtu.be
“At the time, I had 10 years of being a leading lady in the West End and really got a bit between my teeth that there were TV and film people who could come into theater…but going back that way didn’t happen," she said of the disparity between stage and screen actors.
While Waddingham did manage to land the occasional film work, she quickly realized that in those settings, she and her theater peers weren't treated with the same amount of respect as the main stars.
A prominent example of this was when she appeared in the musical film adaptation of 2012's Les Misérables as one of the factory workers in the "At the End of the Day" scene alongside Anne Hathaway, who played Fantine.
You can spot Waddingham in the scene from Les Misérables in the clip below.
Hannah Waddingham - Les Misérables, 2012youtu.be
She recalled her confrontation with the film's director after she ran out of patience on one occasion.
“Tom Hooper and I had a gentle falling out because he asked somebody else to get all us musical theater people to bring it down, and I heard it, and I’d had enough," she said of her breaking point.
"And because I was just doing one scene, I thought: ‘I’m just gonna have to say something,’ and I said: ‘Can I just stop you there?’”
“I just had enough, at this point, of feeling like I should be grateful for a scene in this and a scene in that, and it’ll add up and eventually something will happen."
"I just had enough of it.”
Waddingham pointed to one of the ensemble actors in the scene and told Hooper:
"You do realize that this girl here is playing Fantine, the whole role, in the West End at the moment? Every night? This girl here is currently playing Elphaba… And we’re all here doing one scene for the greater good of this movie."
"Can I remind you that all these people, you wouldn’t have a film to direct unless people were in the West End or Broadway.’”
“‘It is a total vocation. You wouldn’t have a film to direct if we didn’t do the hard work on stage. If you want us to take it down, ask us to take it down."
Hooper, who won an Academy Award for directing 2010's The King's Speech, took Waddingham's comments to heart and they were able to put the confrontation behind them.
“We were fine after that," said Waddingham, adding:
"But I just thought: ‘No, don’t presume that people in theater can only do that, ask us to do that — ask us to just do nothing, give people a chance to prove themselves, don’t write us all off!’”
You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here.
Waddingham credits her TV and film breakthrough to the ITV comedy Benidorm in 2014, followed by Max's Game of Thrones, in which she played "Shame" nun Septa Unella for the fantasy series' fifth and sixth seasons.
She also had a recurring role in the Netflix series Sex Education playing Jackson's LGBTQ+ mother, Sophia Marchetti.
But it was her work on Thrones that made an indelible impression on showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, who eventually penned an email to "the powers that be" advocating for casting her in Ted Lasso, despite its lead star Jason Sudeikis wanting to cast her as Rebecca from the start.
The subject line for the email read:
"What are we even discussing here?"
Waddingham said "It was such a beautiful, quiet, genuine endorsement of 'Let the girl play.'"
Her work on Ted Lasso earned her a Primetime Emmy Award win for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and another for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
Waddingham can currently be seen in the action comedy film Fall Guy, loosely based on the 1980s TV series, starring alongside Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
Last year, it was announced she would appear in the untitled eighth installment of the Mission Impossible film starring Tom Cruise.
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