Hannah Waddingham breaks silence on viral 'show me leg' 2024 paparazzi encounter

In 2024, Hannah Waddingham, best known for Ted Lasso, was set to host the 2024 Olivier Awards at Royal Albert Hall.

But before the ceremony, on the red carpet, she had a tense encounter with a member of the press.

He asked her to “show me leg”, leaving her visibly frustrated.

She fired back at him, saying, “Oh my God, you’d never say that to a man, my friend. Don’t be a d***, otherwise I’ll move off. Don’t say ‘show me leg.’ No.”

Now, the actress is looking back at the incident, sharing that she has buried the hatchet with the photographer.

In an interview with The Guardian, she shared that, though the photographer was not “a friend but she has known him for 20 years and has immense respect for him."

According to Waddingham, an exchange of emails occurred between them, in which he apologized to the actress for his remark.

“He took it on the chin, I called him out, he emailed me, I emailed him back. I was like, ‘Dude, that’s not cool,’ and fair play to him, he was apologetic, and I said, ‘You can’t do that,'" the star said.

“I think he forgot himself. There was an overfamiliarity," Waddingham said, referring to years of familiarity between them.

Irrespective of the apology afterward, the actress said what stung her the most about the awkward moment was that it had overshadowed her hosting duties at the Olivier Awards - a key milestone of her career.

”I just thought, don’t do that, because this is a bespoke Marchesa gown. It stopped on the mid-thigh, and it had a beautiful, diaphanous over-layer," she said, referring to her custom outfit.

"I was going off to host an entire evening live, and my sadness at the time was that it had been reduced to that, instead of my live performance directly after that, which is one of the greatest achievements of my life," Waddingham concluded.