When she was a child, Hannah Waddingham would from time to time go to work with her mother, a mezzo-soprano in the English National Opera, which was based at the Coliseum in London. “That building and the people in it were like my babysitter,” she says. “I was just left to run around, in all the nooks and crannies.” She once got stuck in the orchestra storage room and took fright looking down from the upper circle boxes. But it was a magical place for a child. “If I had stood on that stage at eight, and my older self had whispered in my ear: ‘You’re going to have your own Christmas special here,’ I would have passed out.”
That special, Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas on Apple TV+, is a festive feast, crammed with musical numbers, glam costumes and skits featuring her Ted Lasso co-stars. It feels like a joyous celebration which, for Waddingham, it is. This has been her year. The theatre star found huge fame relatively late in life when she was cast in Ted Lasso, the US comedy about a failing English football team. She had been in other shows – including Game of Thrones, playing the “shame nun” – but it was her role as the football club owner Rebecca Welton that brought Waddingham to a wider audience and won her an Emmy.
