The good, the bad, and the indefensible: the movies that define Hannah Waddingham’s life
Before Ted Lasso debuted on AppleTV+ in 2020 and charmed the world, Hannah Waddingham was perhaps best known for playing Septa Unella, the shame nun, in Game of Thrones.
However, after audiences caught a glimpse of her turn as the ultra-glamorous, statuesque owner of AFC Richmond in Jason Sudeikis’ culture clash football comedy, they went nuts for her. Suddenly, after a 20-year showbusiness career encompassing West End musicals, British sitcoms, and American TV, Waddingham was a superstar, and she has spent the last several years cementing that status by turning her attention to the big screen.
Indeed, her stylish and ultra-unique presence has been displayed in several huge movies since 2022, including Hocus Pocus 2, The Fall Guy, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and she has also lent her vocal talents to The Garfield Movie and Lilo & Stitch.
What exactly are Waddingham’s personal movie tastes, though? Well, she peeled back the curtain on the movies she loves when she appeared on her Ted Lasso co-star Brett Goldstein’s Films To Be Buried With podcast. Fascinatingly, this discussion revealed that her tastes are all across the board, from the sublime to the ridiculous, encompassing good films, bad films, and truly indefensible ones.
According to the actor, the first movie she remembers seeing as a little girl was the 1977 live-action/animation hybrid, Pete’s Dragon, which she and her sister endlessly rented from the local video shop. “We would get it out every single weekend for about a year,” she laughed, admitting that they probably spent considerably more money than if their father had just invested in owning a copy.
Amusingly, though, Mr Waddingham was just as susceptible to the film’s charms as his daughters. “I remember one of my earliest recollections was sitting next to my dad, who’s a kind of autocratic Victorian father,” Waddingham continued, “And I remember looking up at this mountain of a man and thinking, ‘My God, daddy’s crying’.”
When asked her opinion on what is objectively the best film ever made, Waddingham picked Back to the Future, and when asked to name the movies she’d most gladly watch repeatedly, she chose Dirty Dancing and Moulin Rouge, which Most people would agree are good, solid picks.
Hilariously, though, when asked to name a critically derided movie she loves, she said Hudson Hawk, the lamentable Bruce Willis misfire from 1991. “I think it is great,” she insisted. “I think it was just misunderstood. It was way ahead of its time. It’s like a musical”. Indefensibly, she also chose Face/Off in this category, which wasn’t hated by critics at all, but perhaps that says a lot about how the perception of some films changes over the years.
Perhaps the most fascinating insight from Waddingham’s conversation with Goldstein came when she picked the two films she relates to the most. Firstly, she chose the 1985 romcom Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt. She noted that some people may consider that film a guilty pleasure, but she is adamant that there is “nothing guilty about it. They want to have fun. I’m not going to stop them in their vest and panties!” she grinned, “That was me all over”.
Remarkably, though, the second film Waddingham relates to most is a million miles away from a frothy 1980s romcom: Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. The 2001 movie told the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose genius mind succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia, which often manifested as elaborate hallucinations.
“I found it very difficult to watch because I’ve suffered badly all my life with night terrors and visions and things like that,” she revealed, much to Goldstein’s shock. “Not a lot of people know [that] about me”. She admitted that she had gone to see the movie in the cinema by herself, and when it finished, she was frozen in place, with tears streaming down her face.
“I couldn’t move,” she recalled, noting, “I was literally just solid in the chair and traumatised by it. So, it’s not even like a happy, nice cry”.
