20-05-2025
Hannah Waddingham's rise to fame, from West End shows to Hollywood stardom
Hannah Waddingham's star continues to rise year after year, with roles in two major Hollywood films which are set to open on the same day. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and Lilo & Stitch will both see her grace cinema screens on Wednesday, 21 May.
Waddingham has landed the role of Rear Admiral Neely in the Tom Cruise action thriller's latest instalment, as well as voicing an alien leader in Disney's live-action remake of the family favourite Lilo & Stitch.
The London-born star has not had a typical Hollywood movie career - she started out as a West End musical theatre actor and enjoyed plenty of success on the stage before moving into TV and film, with many of her biggest hits having come later in her career.
We take a look back over Waddingham's rise to fame and the biggest moments in her career - including taking on sexism on the red carpet in an infamous rebuke to a photographer.
Waddingham began her career treading the boards of the West End in the late 90s, with her first notable role in sci-fi musical Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens. She went on to land parts in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Beautiful Game, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, The Wizard of Oz and Kiss Me, Kate.
Perhaps her most famous musical theatre role was in Monty Python's Spamalot, where she played the Lady of the Lake and also took the show to Broadway.
In her early days as an actor, Waddingham also dipped her toe into TV work, with small roles in the likes of Brookside, Hollyoaks: Let Loose, Footballers' Wives, Doctors and Agatha Christie's Marple.
She had a seven-episode run in Benidorm in 2014, but it was Game of Thrones that gave her an unexpected big break in 2015 when she won the role of Septa Unella whilst heavily pregnant.
Talking to the White Wine Question Time podcast in 2021, she recalled the Game of Thrones audition: "I was nearly eight-and-a-half months pregnant, like pregnant from the cheekbones out, you know, when your face joins in, in the last month! I walked in, and honestly, I genuinely thought I was in the wrong place. Because all the women were like, 70-odd, about five foot two and about 20 foot wide. I was like: 'Right. I appreciate that I'm pregnant at the moment but I'm definitely in the wrong casting.'"
She added: "I went along as a kind of 'hello, I clearly can't help you out at the moment, I'm about to give birth. But I just wanted to come and say hello for next time', which I think a lot of actors would do." However, Waddingham was offered the role and flew out to Dubrovnik to begin filming, bringing her then eight-week-old daughter.
Waddingham was famously waterboarded in one scene and said: "Was it massively uncomfortable, and easily the worst day other than my gruelling childbirth? Yes. And I don't care who knows it. And they all know it."
Her best known TV role is as football club owner Rebecca Welton in Ted Lasso, and she told White Wine Question Time she had asked the universe for a great job close to home after a scary experience being stuck in Belfast filming Krypton when her daughter fell unexpectedly ill. She said: "I'm not joking, within two months, the audition came in for Ted Lasso that shoots 40 minutes away from my house!"
She said of her audition with Jason Sudeikis: "We just immediately got on like a house on fire in a very low-key way. I think just on a very basic level, Jason and I just got on. And he obviously liked what I did. And then when I came home, I didn't hear anything for ages. And I just thought: 'Okay, well that was that. I couldn't have done any better with the material. I felt the character really rippled through my bloodstream.'"
Of course, Waddingham was offered the role eventually and found out Sudeikis had wanted her for the show immediately: "He had just gone: 'I knew it was her when she walked in the room and why do you need to go for someone else when she is how I imagined her sounding, how I imagined her looking?' And as we left the room, I had said to our casting director Kimberley: 'But Rebecca doesn't sing does she?' And Jason was walking in front of us and under his breath he went: 'She does now'."
Waddingham has also starred in Sex Education, Tom Jones, and narrated the adaptation of Julia Donaldson's Tiddler.
Success on stage and screen has made Waddingham the perfect choice for some high-profile hosting roles.
In 2023 and 2024 she was the host of The Olivier Awards, and she was also invited to present the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023 when it was hosted by Liverpool.
Speaking to Yahoo UK at the time, she said: "It's kind of been accidental, I was asked to host the Oliviers and was so blown over to be asked, then I was asked to do Eurovision [and] I genuinely thought somebody had dropped out. So when I heard they hadn't I just thought, 'Oh my God'.
"I don't know how this has come about, but I'm so grateful that it did. And I would happily present [Eurovision] every year if I could, and be the new Katie Boyle or Terry Wogan."
She also landed her very own Christmas TV special in 2023 for Apple TV.
However, her delight at hosting the 2024 Oliviers came under a slight cloud when a photographer on the red carpet ahead of the ceremony asked her to "show some leg" from under her dress as she posed for pictures.
An outraged Waddingham was caught on a fan's video, posted to X, responding: "Oh my god, you'd never say that to a man, my friend. Don't be a d***, otherwise I'll move off. Don't say, 'Show me leg.' No."
Waddingham was cheered on by the crowd, as well as many of those who saw the video afterwards.
Hannah Waddingham, "You'd never say that to a man, my friend" when a photographer demanded she show some leg.
— AskAubry 🦋 🐆🦝 (@ask_aubry) April 15, 2024
Speaking to The One Show about the incident, she said: "I'm good, I called out what needed to be absolutely necessary to call out and I've received a written apology and now I'm so ready to move on.
"I'm not having it overshadow what was the most glorious, joyful, positive night. I don't usually say this, but I was really flipping proud of that night. It did exactly what we wanted it to, the whole place erupted like a bunch of lunatics, so that's what the takeaway should be."
Not content with dominating theatre and the small screen, Waddingham is now branching out into Hollywood film stardom, too.
In 2024, she had a role in The Fall Guy alongside Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, and voiced a character in The Garfield Movie.
This week sees two films opening on the same day featuring Waddingham. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning sees her star as Rear Admiral Neely alongside Tom Cruise, and she can also be heard voicing an alien leader in the live-action remake of Disney's Lilo & Stitch.
Upcoming roles include a voice role in Smurfs later in the year, and an appearance in the adaptation of Ruth Ware thriller The Woman in Cabin 10, starring Keira Knightley and Guy Pearce.
In 2024 she told Michelle Visage's BBC Radio 2 Rule Breakers podcast that she had been determined to make it as a screen star after some harsh criticism earlier in life: "I had one drama teacher that said to the whole class 'Oh Hannah will never work on screen because she looks like one side of her face has had a stroke'. And I thought, 'I will do, I will do. Come hell or high water, I will work on screen'... and it gave me a complex for years."
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and Lilo & Stitch are both released in cinemas on Wednesday, 21 May.
