My worst moment: ‘Ted Lasso’ star Hannah Waddingham and the mouse that got trapped in her costume on stage

Hannah Waddingham plays perhaps the most fabulous woman on television in the Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso” as Rebecca, the owner of a football (soccer) team who is always dressed to the nines. In Season 1, she hires Coach Lasso (played by Jason Sudeikis) in the hopes of sinking the team and sticking it to her ex-husband, who lost the team in their divorce.

This season, she’s abandoned that scheme and is fully in Lasso’s corner. But that doesn’t mean all is well. “It’s not like she’s suddenly this brand new person who has made peace with her toxic ex and suddenly knows what she’s doing,” Waddingham said. “The one thing she has very much in her favor is that she absolutely loves being the owner of the team and she’s doing it because she wants to be there, not because she has some ulterior motive to destroy the team. These are her boys and she is very much the lioness at the front of the pack.” But she’s far less confident when it comes to her personal life, which is a major part of this season’s storyline.

Prior to “Ted Lasso,” Waddingham was best known to American audiences as the memorably grim Septa Unella on “Game of Thrones,” who chastised Cersei with the words: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” But Waddingham also has a substantial career in musical theater, both on London’s West End and Broadway, and it was a couple of memories from her time on stage that came to mind when asked about a worst moment in her career.

My worst moment …

“I have two stories, they both happened when I was in Monty Python’s ‘Spamalot’ playing The Lady of the Lake.

“The first happened in 2008 when we were on Broadway. We were doing the ‘Knights of the Roundtable’ number and I’m wearing a fully nude gauze jumpsuit with all these beautiful Swarovski crystals hand-sewn onto it. I got my feet caught in my costume when we were doing the dance routine, so I hit the deck and whacked the front of my shins on something. I felt something wet on my legs, but I didn’t look down. I thought maybe it was sweat.

“And I heard the audience, literally the whole downstage left part of the orchestra seating, gasp. And you know, you’ve got your plastic smile set on your face and I just thought, ‘God, they’re really rude! I’m just a bit sweaty!’

“But it wasn’t sweat. When I came offstage (laughs) I realized I literally had blood pouring out of my legs. My costume was completely ruined. I guess they had to find some demon dry cleaners to try to clean it before the next performance. So glamorous! And I had to get stitches. You can still see the scars. I have Broadway war wounds!

“So that’s one story. The other one is worse.

“When I was performing in ‘Spamalot’ in the West End, there was a scene where I come up through the floor holding the Holy Grail and there’s choruses of angels going, ‘Ahhh-ahhh-ahhh,’ and King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable are waiting for me to come up and starting singing this torch song.

“So I come up through the floor and went to move across the stage. And I raised my arm holding the grail, and I could feel this weird discomfort, like right around my right shoulder. And in my brain I was trying to make it all right by going, ‘Oh, I had physio yesterday, my muscle must be spasming.’ Anyway, it eventually stopped when I moved my arm back down, and I didn’t think any more of it.

“Cut to: Two days later, I’m in my dressing room thinking, what is that disgusting smell? It was this acrid stench. And then I felt my costume and I thought, have they put a bit of padding in the shoulder of my dress? I shook it out and a dead mouse flew across the room, smacked against the wall and landed on the floor.

“When I did a quick change during the show two days before, it must have crawled inside and got between the lining of the dress and the outside of the dress. So I was wearing it when it was alive. And I was wearing it when it was dead, wondering, what is that stink? Well, I had a dead mouse in my costume for two days.

“There were all the jokes afterward: Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up your frock.

“But I went home that night and barely slept because I imagined mice in my bed. "

Theaters are old buildings, are mice just part of that reality?

“Yep. I know friends who were in ‘We Will Rock You’ and at one point a mouse came out on stage and then the set started moving and the mouse was like, ‘Oh no,’ and scattered off. You just get used to it.

“For this number in ‘Spamalot,’ I used to have to change substage. I would run off stage from one scene and I was flinging off my costume as we went because I had something like one minute and 13 seconds for me to change into a completely different costume. Then I would go downstairs and my brilliant costume people would already have the dress on the floor for me to step into. So the mouse must have got in at some point, panicked, and then when I quickly put it on, the mouse got stuck. And then it must have died from shock. Or I deafened him to death with my singing.

“After I found the dead mouse, the next day I rang the company manager and I said, ‘I’m presuming the costume has been fumigated and dry-cleaned?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m sure it has been.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no — not “I’m sure it has been,” I need to see a dry cleaning label on it.’

“And after that, I didn’t let them put my costume on the floor again. Someone was holding it and I would step into it. It was too much — a live mouse in your dress? You’ve got to be kidding me (laughs)! I can’t believe I was in my dressing room pressing the costume and wondering if that was padding and then oh, that’s not paddinnnnng!”

The takeaway …

“I love theater. It’s crazy, it’s visceral and whatever happens just happens and you just have to roll with it. There’s no ‘cut,’ there’s no edits, there’s no one else controlling what’s happening — you get on stage, you do your thing, you don’t bump into the furniture hopefully and you get off.

“Anyone from West End musical theater who hears this story knows what I mean — well, if they haven’t heard this story a million times anyway, because it became a bit of an urban myth. People were like, ‘Oh my God, did you hear about that girl who had a live mouse in her costume and then it was dead and she was still performing?’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, that was me.’”

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