Hannah Waddingham was once told that she wouldn’t work on screen because she didn’t have the right face.
The Ted Lasso actress has revealed that she was determined to prove her drama teacher wrong after receiving the childhood insult.
“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,'” the actress recalled on Michelle Visage’s Rule Breakers podcast. “I thought, I will do. Come hell or high water, I will work on screen.”
The British star admitted the comment “gave (her) a complex for years” and she used to “knacker (herself) senseless” trying to show the teacher they were wrong.
“I would say that was my biggest rule break ever – to go, ‘You know what? I’m just going to see,'” she continued. “I used to be doing a (theatre) show at night and I used to literally take anything to get myself on screen.”
Hannah also recalled that a school headteacher was “always dismissive” of her and didn’t support her acting ambitions because she turned her back on academia.
“She refused to give me a reference, so I managed to get a scholarship for the drama school I went to and I walked back in, put it on her desk and left the room without shutting the door,” she remembered. “She would purposely put everyone else in the school plays and have me understudy.”
The 49-year-old started out in the theatre before getting her big break on screen in shows such as Game of Thrones and Sex Education.
She has since won an Emmy, a Critics Choice Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for playing Rebecca Welton in Ted Lasso.