Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham wishes more people would be open about how exhausting motherhood can truly be.
“Thank God she is the utter joy of my life because it is unyielding responsibility,” Waddingham, 50, told The Sunday Times of her 10-year-old daughter in an interview published on Saturday, June 7.
“I feel like more people should talk about how exhausting it is,” she added, chuckling. “Not only physically showing up for them but being the best version of yourself, because they respond to actions far more than words.”
Waddingham, who does not name her daughter publicly, told the outlet that she decided she wanted to have a child when she was single in her 30s — but that the path to parenthood was a difficult one.
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“I was told I couldn’t have children and then I went down the eastern medicine route, had my body balanced out,” she explained. On her 40th birthday, after conceiving her daughter without any medical intervention, she took her baby girl home.
Later, Waddingham separated from her daughter’s father, Gianluca Cugnetto, an Italian businessman. At 50, she’s raising her daughter as a single mother, telling the outlet that after her daughter suffered a health scare when she was 3 she only picks jobs that work with and for her life as a single mom.
“[She’s] my greatest champion and my most horrific critic,” Waddingham said of her daughter, who is now also showing an interest in the entertainment business after starring in a school production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“She feels such a sense of vitality from that, which I love, but I just want her to know that for 22 years I would be on stage thinking, ‘Am I going to make the last Tube?” the proud mom says of her own struggles to make it in Hollywood before landing her breakout role in Apple TV’s hit series Ted Lasso.
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“I need her to be aware that I really grafted for 22 years,” she added. “Life is not being picked up by a black Mercedes.”
After more than two decades struggling to make it as an onscreen actor, the work has more than paid off — especially when it comes to what her newfound fame has made possible for her family.
“I’ve just become more known,” Waddingham said. “Being afforded the luxury of the kind of roles that I always knew I could play and, as a single mum, the luxury of being able to put my daughter in great schools. It does give you freedom. I genuinely don’t give a s*** about fame. I never have. I never will.”
