I’m speaking to the Woman Who Likes the Biscuits, as my kids have labelled her. She has a real and very famous name, of course. The biscuit-eating woman is British actor Hannah Waddingham, who, for millions of viewers, will forever be Rebecca Welton: the formidable owner of AFC Richmond, whose reluctant fondness for Ted Lasso’s daily shortbread became one of the show’s sweetest running jokes.
A little secret: those famous biscuits weren’t nearly as delicious as audiences imagined. “They were rancid,” she laughs.
Waddingham is on the phone from her home in London and we’ve been talking about the return of Ted Lasso, Apple TV’s award-winning phenomenon that arrives back on our screens on August 5 after a three-year absence. The series, with its radical optimism and belief in kindness over cynicism, became an unlikely cultural touchstone when it premiered in 2020, earning record-breaking Emmy nominations and back-to-back wins for Outstanding Comedy Series. In 2021, Waddingham won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role.
When I ask what it feels like to step back into the character’s impeccably tailored shoes for a fourth season, the Woman Who Likes the Biscuits starts crying.
“I’m sorry,” she says after a long pause. “I find it a bit difficult to talk about at the moment.”
Waddingham explains that this is the first interview she has given since the death of Anthony Head, who played Rupert Mannion, Rebecca’s manipulative ex-husband and, off-screen, one of her closest companions. “There is no Rebecca without Rupert. He undoubtedly made my Rebecca what she was,” she says. “He was one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met. Even finer as a human. He loved the craft, loved his fellow actors entirely, knew everybody on the crew’s name and was always there for everyone else.”
She laughs through the sadness, remembering the absurdity of filming scenes in which Rupert and Rebecca despised one another. “When we did the food fight scene, we were literally like two 12-year-olds.” She’s referring to an infamous scene in season three, where the two attend a dinner party that turns into a highly comical food fight.
If you’re lucky enough to spend an hour in Waddingham’s company, you quickly realise that what audiences have fallen in love with isn’t simply Rebecca Welton, who helped transform Ted Lasso into one of the defining television series of the decade. There is an infectious warmth to the actor that makes you feel as though you’ve known her for years. She is whip-smart, effortlessly funny and refreshingly free of celebrity affectation.
Then there is the extraordinary talent. Waddingham possesses a four-octave vocal range (for context, this range is found in fewer than one per cent of singers), which explains why she performed her own musical numbers in Ted Lasso, from the soaring rendition of “Let It Go” in the episode titled “Make Rebecca Great Again”, to the Christmas special and the emotionally charged funeral episode. In 2023, she brought that voice to the stage once again with Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas, her acclaimed Apple TV concert special and accompanying live album.
There is another side to Waddingham that Australian audiences may not know. Before we’ve even properly begun the interview, she tells me she’s “a little bit obsessed with Australians” and would happily live in Sydney after spending four months here filming The Fall Guy. “I bloody loved it,” she says. “There’s something about the Australian accent that’s warm and playful and inviting and joyful. I’m definitely an honorary member of your gang.”
Born and raised in Wandsworth, London, Waddingham grew up surrounded by music and theatre. Her mother, Melodie Kelly, was a principal soprano at the Royal Opera House before stepping away from her career for more than a decade to raise Waddingham and her brother. When she returned, it wasn’t to the starring roles she had once occupied but to the chorus. Waddingham never once heard her complain. “I never saw her drop the ball once,” she says. “She was an angel amongst us. She committed fully.” Her father offered different lessons. “He always said, ‘Show up. Have done the work. Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it.'”
She remembers being bullied at school. “I was bullied because they thought I came from wealthy parents because of the girls I hung out with,” she says. “Actually, if they’d scratched the surface, my mum and I used to walk around the supermarket singing ‘The Bare Necessities’.” She laughs now at the absurdity of it. “Typical of kids. Assholes, basically. If I ever get a whiff of any kind of bullying behaviour, anybody being ostracised on any job, I’m all over it. I’m a good person to have in your corner.”
Today, at 52, her career is flying. The long-awaited fourth season of Ted Lasso reunites her with Rebecca, now guiding Richmond into a new era with a women’s football team, while Ride or Die, a new series she stars in opposite Octavia Spencer, reveals another side of Waddingham entirely. She plays an assassin and, true to form, insisted on performing the fight sequences herself. “What’s the point of playing an assassin if you’re not going to do your own stunts?” she laughs. “Every single fight I did. I’m really proud to be able to say that.”
Filming Ride or Die only reinforced something that has become a defining theme throughout Waddingham’s career. Whether she’s talking about Spencer, Jason Sudeikis, Anthony Head or Juno Temple, she almost always returns to the people before the project. Success, in Waddingham’s world, is measured as much by the friendships forged on set as the work itself. She gravitates towards generous collaborators and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a remarkable knack for turning colleagues into lifelong friends.
Mention Ted Lasso and she immediately begins praising the writers before she mentions the cast. “I think Jason Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt and the writers’ room should be incredibly proud of themselves because it starts with them,” she says. “You can have the greatest casting on the planet but if the writing isn’t as fabulous as it is, none of this would have happened.” Watching Sudeikis work, she says, is like watching “a tailor”. “He’s constantly honing and honing and honing. He’ll write on the back of the script, on a wall, on his knee … and sometimes when the camera’s already on me, he’ll suddenly say, ‘Say this instead.'” She laughs. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re such a bugger.’ But it always, always, always makes it better.”
She rejects the suggestion that Ted Lasso succeeded simply because it arrived during the uncertainty of the pandemic. “I think people do the show a disservice saying it was what everyone needed during Covid,” she says. “I think it would have happened regardless because we’d got into such a period where seemingly the only thing people were laughing at was somebody being roasted.” Waddingham has never understood comedy built on humiliation. “I don’t like comedy at the expense of somebody else.” Instead, she believes, Ted Lasso reminded audiences that kindness could be every bit as compelling as conflict. “It leans into everybody’s neuroses together, everybody’s joy together, people not knowing what the hell they’re doing with their lives and the humour of finding your way together. It’s unbelievably positive, and that’s not saccharine. It’s just beautiful.”
This season, Rebecca returns as a woman who has finally found peace. After three seasons defined by heartbreak, revenge and, ultimately, forgiveness, Waddingham says she was desperate to discover who Rebecca became once she was no longer defined by her past. “This is the first season where she’s really stepping into her own happiness,” she says. “Not only with her partner, but she’s stepping into being the figurehead of that team more than ever, championing the women’s team and championing funding.”
Away from the cameras, however, there is another role that eclipses everything else. If Rebecca Welton is the character audiences know best, motherhood is the role that defines Hannah Waddingham; and yet, she admits, it wasn’t something she always imagined. “I got to 37,” she says, “and suddenly had this ovarian urge.” Sitting in her dressing room at The London Palladium dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West, she remembers the feeling vividly. “It was like in Indiana Jones when he grabs his hat before the door slams shut. I felt like I could see my last good egg on the other side and I had to grab it.” Soon afterwards, she was told her fertility was “balefully low”. Against the odds, she conceived her daughter, now 12, naturally at 39. “I realise my deep privilege,” she says. “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Splitting from her daughter’s father when her daughter was two, Waddingham has since raised her as a single parent. “My daughter comes first in all things,” she says. “We go through my schedule with a fine-tooth comb and it’s always based on my daughter’s movements first. My team are wonderful with that. They’re always mindful that she comes first and that I’m a mummy first. The buck begins and ends with a single parent. There is no respite. I want other single parents to know that I see them, and they’re doing a great job because it’s hardcore.”
She hopes her daughter grows up seeing a healthy relationship with food, fashion and her own body. “I’m not a small woman,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m five-foot-eleven (180 centimetres). I’m a UK size 12, sometimes a 14, and I like the fact she sees I have a healthy tummy. She sees that I eat. I’ve got a massive appetite and I’m a big foodie, so we’re always sharing all of that together.”
That same honesty has shaped the way she now speaks publicly about another subject women have too often been expected to endure in silence: perimenopause. During the past year, she found herself functioning, working and showing up every day while feeling strangely disconnected from herself. “I felt like I had a foggy pane of glass in front of me.” Like so many women, she convinced herself she was simply tired until one of her oldest friends refused to let her carry on pretending. “She said to me, ‘Han, you’re going to see my lady and we’re going to get you levelled out.'” Waddingham laughs. “Once I got all my bits and pieces levelled out, she was like, ‘You’re welcome.'” For too long, she believes, women have been conditioned simply to keep going. “We keep calm and carry on,” she says. “But we’re not actually keeping calm and carrying on. We’re veiling it in a layer of nonsense.”
I ask what excites her most about the decade ahead. After all, how do you top an Emmy Award, two Critics Choice Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and nominations for BAFTA, Golden Globe and Olivier Awards? She talks about watching her daughter become her own person, about “hiding cleverly in a bush” while giving her the confidence to find her own way and about continuing to tell stories that make people laugh, cry and perhaps feel a little less alone.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she tells me about the newest addition to the family: a rescue dog abandoned in a bag before finding its way to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. “I want to call him Keith,” she laughs. “My daughter wants Biscuit.”
“I always knew what I had inside me,” she adds.
And as we say goodbye, I realise that those aren’t the words of a woman trying to convince herself. They are simply the truth of someone who had trusted her own worth long before the rest of us caught up. Perhaps that’s Hannah Waddingham’s greatest achievement. Not that the world finally discovered her, but that she never doubted it eventually would.
CREDITS:
Talent: Hannah Waddingham
Editor/Writer: Georgie McCourt
Photographer: Zoltan Tombor
Stylist: Cassie Walker Graham Hair: James Rowe
Makeup: Hannah Martin
Manicure: Jessica Thompson
Tailor: Tailored by Nancy
Production: Darling Creative
Wearing: Chloe, Bvlgari
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