Hannah Waddingham said she never auditioned for the role of Madame Morrible in Wicked, drawing a clean line under a rumor that had followed her for years. Instead, she traced the career turns that pushed her forward, from a bruising run of bad reviews to the work that later carried her from theater into Ted Lasso.
The clarification comes as Waddingham is back in the conversation after a recent appearance on Saturday Night Live U.K., where she sang in most of the sketches. She met in May with a reporter at the Café Royal in London, barefoot after kicking off a pair of black stilettos, and used the interview to look back on the moments that changed her career path.
One of those moments came in 2000, when she had just finished a musical about artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. The show closed early after being panned in the press, but her performance as Toulouse-Lautrec's lover, Suzanne Valadon, was singled out for praise. One British newspaper wrote that she deserved to be in a better musical, and Waddingham said the response, however harsh overall, helped propel her into the next phase of her career.
Andrew Lloyd Webber noticed. He later handpicked her for The Beautiful Game when she was 26 years old, after her work in the badly reviewed production drew rave notices of its own. Waddingham said he told her that anyone who can earn strong reviews in something that receives such bad reviews is the sort of person he wanted to work with. The Beautiful Game told the story of a Belfast soccer team against the backdrop of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and for Waddingham it became a key early credit.
Her route into the business had started long before that. After leaving school, she enrolled at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, then dropped out after two years to join Joey and Gina's Wedding, an improv dinner show in the basement of London's Café Royal. The audience played wedding guests as the nuptials descended into chaos, and some attendees thought they had crashed a real wedding and apologized for not bringing a gift. Waddingham called it “absolute carnage but great fun,” adding that it pushed everyone headlong into improvisation.
That path helps explain why the Wicked rumor landed so firmly: Waddingham has long been associated with musicals, yet it had been a number of years since she appeared in one before her small role as a factory worker in Tom Hooper's 2012 adaptation of Les Misérables. Even now, she says the thread running through all of it is simple. “Whether it be acting, song, dance,” she said, “I just couldn’t have imagined doing anything else.” The next question is not whether she was ever in the running for Wicked; it is what role, on stage or screen, follows after she has made clear the story was never hers to begin with.
