[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Ted Lasso, Season 1, Episode 9, "All Apologies."]There’s a lengthy list of stellar scenes for Hannah Waddingham in Ted Lasso, but the one that utterly knocked the wind out of me pops up in Episode 9. While Rebecca struggles to admit the truth to Ted (Jason Sudeikis) about her plan to destroy the team, Rupert (Anthony Head) arrives to deliver an especially crushing one-two punch - not only is he having a baby with Bex (Keeley Hazell), but he also opts to tell Rebecca, “I do want a child. I just suppose I didn’t want one with … before.” The comment is as pointed and cruel as they come, and Waddingham’s performance ensures you feel every ounce of Rebecca’s devastation.
With hopes high that Ted Lasso will continue its very successful awards season run with the Emmys on the horizon and with Season 2 of the show due out on Apple TV+ on July 23rd, Waddingham took the time to join us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to discuss the show and the career choices that led her there. We covered a little bit of everything including Waddingham’s earliest entertainment industry goals, working on Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables and playing Septa Unella on Game of Thrones, but during the Ted Lasso portion of our conversation, a top priority was discussing Episode 9 and that heartbreaking conversation between Rupert and Rebecca. But in order to do so, we had to go back to the very beginning of the show, back to when Rebecca was being teed up as the main antagonist.
Initially, Rebecca is presented as a rather ruthless individual who’ll stop at nothing to get back at her ex, even if it means taking others down with him. However, with great finesse, Ted Lasso slowly starts to reveal Rebecca’s true colors and what’s compelling her to make such choices. Waddingham explained, “I think the writing is so exquisite that I was discovering her softness and her hard shell every day.”
While one might suspect Waddingham might have been given the heads up on the precise details of Rebecca and Rupert’s past, that wasn’t the case. But, it turns out, the Rebecca backstory Waddingham formulated for herself is actually right in line with what Episode 9 delivers. Here’s how she described it:
“I had no idea that she was going to have come from such a verbally abusive relationship. I had no idea of the arc with the old Rebecca/new Rebecca thing and the pregnancy and all of that. I had no idea. But, bizarrely, what I created for myself as a backstory was that when she and Rupert got together, she probably would have been around 30, and that she was very keen to have children and so put her own career on the back burner to try and convince him. He had always said that he didn’t want to have children - this was all in my own head, that he’d never wanted to have children, and so she had chosen man or child, and she’d stuck with the man. And can you imagine how weird it was then when I was given Episode 9 and Rupert comes in and says, ‘No, I just didn’t want a child with …’ And, honestly, that one scene that goes from on the verge of confessing to Ted to the funniness of her embarrassment at talking to Ted’s rewinding the scene to going out and thinking, ‘No, I’ve got to be accountable for my sh*t. I’ve taught Keely that you must be accountable,’ then to see the switch of Rupert coming in and saying all of that and then walking and telling Ted. That whole sequence that I think M.J. Delaney just masterfully directed - it gives me goose pimples just talking about it - that whole sequence I had no idea that that was going to be the storyline, but in my head, I had created that she was a woman who had missed the boat with her fertility.”
The incredible thing about Waddingham’s work in that moment is that, even if the show doesn’t convey all of those specifics via dialogue, you can still feel it in her performance. While Waddingham deserves all the credit in the world for her stellar work in that beat, she insisted on highlighting what Head brought to the scene - something that he chose to do even after being wrapped for the day.
“We had shot Anthony Head’s coverage during the day and then they weren’t going to be coming around for my coverage, for some reason, until later. And I think Anthony saw my face fall because we were so much in the moment - I think it was over lunch or something, they went, ‘Oh, we’ll come back to this after lunch.’ And I was just like, ‘Ah! Ah!’ And they said, ‘Anthony, you’ve wrapped for the day,’ because the next bit was gonna be me turning around to walk down the stairs to go and confess to Ted, and you know what that man did? This is what I mean about it being a company of theater players, he stayed and waited and before the camera rolled, he spat a load of nasty, shitty words about her and him in my ear, so that when I turned around, I was back where I needed to be. That is special casting.”
If you’re eager to hear more about Waddingham’s experience working on Ted Lasso Season 1, stay tuned because we’ll have her full episode of Collider Ladies Night for you next week! And in the meantime, you can check out what she teased about Ted Lasso Season 2 below.