Hannah Waddingham Had the Perfect Response to Sexism on the ...

The world of red-carpet photography (and, of course, its shady cousin, the lurking-outside-fancy-restaurants-and-yelling-at-celebrities paparazzi brigade) hasn’t always been the most politically correct. I’ve worked enough press junkets to know that photographers will regularly yell out comments to posing—or internally cringing—famous people that actively cross the line into sexist, invasive, or, well, just kind of gross. (I, personally, am still mad at the photographer who wouldn’t stop yelling rude questions to Lindsay Lohan about her sobriety at the premiere of her MTV reality series in 2019. Yes, it’s been five years—and no, I don’t know Lohan personally—but I continue to hope he’s having a bad day.)

Given all this context, it’s probably not surprising that seeing Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham call out a photographer’s red-carpet sexism at the Olivier Awards in London on Sunday was a cathartic experience on a par with watching a guy who’s been catcalling you trip over a parking cone. “Show me leg,” the photographer apparently demanded of Waddingham, to which she had the perfect reply: “Oh my God, you’d never say that to a man…. Don’t be a dick, otherwise I’ll move off. Don’t say ‘show me leg.’ No.” Watch the video for yourself, below:

I don’t particularly envy the lives of professional actresses, for many reasons, but I imagine one of the most difficult parts of the job has to be getting used to seeing yourself the way the world (or at least the warped world of Hollywood) sees you: a woman to be artfully arranged in whatever way is most pleasing to the man holding the lens. Obviously there are scores of feminist actors pushing back against this narrow and dated vision of a woman’s role in film, and personally, I’m glad that Waddingham is one of them. Having the courage to call out sexism in real time is no small thing, and doing it while the cameras are rolling is even cooler.