Pull up a chair. Grab a glass of cheer. Go straight to Apple TV+. Now you are ready to witness the further rise of the Emmy-award winning actor Hannah Waddingham. This is the Christmas extravaganza that no Ted Lasso fan will want to miss. A blanket invitation went out to all the Ted Lasso cast to join her for this singing and dancing spectacular. Apple tantalizingly promises surprises, but look out for co-stars Juno Temple, Phil Dunster, Brendan Hunt, James Lance, Billy Harris, Kola Bokinni, Toheeb Jimoh, Jeremy Swift and Nick Mohammed.
“2024 is really going to have to go some because 2023 has been insane,” says Waddingham, who most recently co-hosted the Earthshot Prize in Singapore with Prince William as well as the Eurovision Song Contest. Her Christmas show, performing classics in front of a live audience at the London Coliseum, is a dream come true for Waddingham who spent much of her childhood there, watching her opera-singing mother Melodie Kelly perform and rehearse.
“I said to Apple, if we’re going to do this anywhere, it’s going to have to be the London Coliseum. I’ve run around those corridors since I was 8 years old. The reason why I am who I am as a performer is from sitting in that theater watching the great opera singers of the day,” she explains. “And for Apple to listen to that, and get that theatre booked was absolutely jaw-dropping. We filmed it on the 27th of May, which was uncommonly sweaty in London. We put out an invitation saying: ‘Please wear your Christmas finery’.”
Among those in the audience was Waddingham’s mother who is heavily inflicted with Parkinson’s disease, her dad who has had triple bypass heart surgery and her eight-year-old daughter, Kitty. “To have those two there, to have my little girl, who by some quirk of the universe's fate was eight years old when we were shooting the show…. And I was eight years old in the very box that I put her in. It's unbelievable kismet.”