Hannah Waddingham's first TV role was a single strip-club scene: her forgotten 2002 debut on "Coupling" just resurfaced — and she's unrecognizable in it
Every icon has a Before picture. Meryl had The Deadliest Season. Brad had the El Pollo Loco chicken suit. And Hannah Waddingham — Emmy winner, Eurovision host, owner of television's most weaponized cheekbones — had Jenny Turbot, lap dancer.
The internet has just rediscovered her TV debut, and it's a delight.
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One scene, one wig-adjacent hairdo
The year is 2002. The show is Coupling, Steven Moffat's very horny BBC sitcom about six thirty-somethings dating at each other. In the Season 3 premiere, "Split," Jack Davenport's freshly dumped Steve ends up at a strip club, where the dancer entertaining his table — sporting a spectacularly early-aughts hairdo — turns out to be recognized by one of his friends from school days.
That dancer is a 28-year-old Waddingham, visibly already better than the material, two full decades before Rebecca Welton would bite into a biscuit and change my life personally.
She was never struggling, to be clear
Waddingham wasn't some undiscovered ingenue — she was already a West End fixture, and her first screen decade was guest spots and soaps while she racked up Olivier nominations onstage. She's said herself that "musical theatre has changed my life the most," crediting it with the stamina that made everything after possible.
As for fame arriving in her forties rather than at Jenny Turbot age:
"I can see why younger people lose their [minds]," she told The Times of careers that hit warp speed too early.
Hers hit warp speed at exactly the right time. Jenny Turbot walked so Rebecca Welton could strut.
Earlier we wrote: ‘She’s not full of crap’: the reason Spielberg’s mother gave for 30 years of Judge Judy
