Confluence and Congruence
Look who we have here. In light of Chloë Grace Moretz officially coming out of the closet, it’s only a matter of time before Juno Temple and Hannah Waddingham do. If you scroll onto the below photos, you will find out when they were taken. When you look at all of them, it’s easy to write it off as just girls being girls, but Hannah isn’t as kissy with other women as she is with Juno. It’s something of a rarity for her, if not a highly unlikely occurrence. By the way, the “V” on Juno’s bracelet is the initial of her middle name: Violet (hence why she’s wearing a violet dress).
Last November, Hannah Waddingham told Alastair James for Attitude Magazine: “It wouldn’t cross my mind to not lift the LGBTQ community up. I feel like often the community is judged for being one thing externally. I think too often people look at the exterior of the LGBTQ community. It’s why I wanted to do RuPaul’s Drag Race because I wanted to take a look into the brilliant performers that people are as well, and to not just be defined by the obvious things that everyone else defines them by.”
In that same month, an interviewer named Sam Damshenas for the Gay Times magazine said to her: “You are huge with queer women, when I told my best friend who’s a lesbian, and my sister who’s a lesbian, that I was interviewing you… They went nuts.”
In 2013, Hannah was the lead of a reading for But I’m a Cheerleader: The Musical. The original was a 1999 female-driven comedy co-starring a lesbian named Clea DuVall.
In January of this year, Hannah made it clear that it’s out of the question for herself to have straight male friends when talking about her love life: “I’d rather hang with my girlfriends and gay friends and be respected.”
If her love for the LGBT community was restricted to gay guys and transsexuals, the lesbian-themed DIVA website wouldn’t have saw fit to reiterate the story. Especially since the DIVA podcast, podDIVA, is produced by a fellow English actress - Rachel Shelley (who was one of the regulars in a sapphic TV series called The L Word).
What’s fascinating to note is that Rachel and Hannah had made guest appearances in separate Season 3 episodes of Coupling (circa 2002). This was a few years before Hannah played a lesbian prisoner in a play based on the Bad Girls TV series. It’s a surprise then that Hannah somehow managed to dodge being cast in the Lip Service TV series when that was on from 2010 to 2012.
Let’s consider that Hannah played a lesbian not only in the Sex Education series but in episode 3 of the short-lived Willow series. As for Juno Temple, she first captured the attention of the LGBT community when she starred in a lesbian-themed werewolf film titled Jack & Diane (2012). It’s not a coinicidence that Juno played a bisexual in the Ted Lasso series, and kissed Brittany Snow in the music video for Plushgun’s Just Impolite (2008).
In a February 2021 interview by Lea Palmieri for Decider, Juno talked about her Ted Lasso co-star several months before Season 2 came out: “Hannah has truly come into my life and become an inspiration forever. I find her magnetic and I love her so deeply. I also fancy the pants off her. I’m in awe of the grace in which she carries herself through life and the way she does this extraordinary performance and is the most hands-on mother at the same time. Yeah, she blows your mind.”
In August 2021, Juno told Vanity Fair reporter Savannah Walsh: “She is like a real-life guardian angel that came into my universe.”
After winning an Emmy in September of that year, Hannah told Juno Temple in her acceptance speech: “If you ever leave my life, I'm going to stalk you.”
There is a Chinese proverb which goes: “Truth is oft disguised as jest.”
The series finale (i.e. Season 3) of Ted Lasso hinted at the possibility of there being a spin-off surrounding a female football team. Hannah told Emily Zemler for the Los Angeles Times: “When Juno and I read that, we didn’t know how we wanted to convey our excitement about the potential of that.”
On Sunday, June 11 in 2023, Hannah and Juno spoke to Access Hollywood at the For Your Consideration Emmys event where they talked about their final scene together. Juno said: “They actually did that on purpose for me, they saved it so my last moment of the show could be with Hannah, and it was very emotional.”
For those who miss Ted Lasso, I recommend an old British soap drama about a football team. Titled Dream Team, it aired on Sky One from 1997 to 2007. It wasn’t a comedy but it definitely had humour from time to time. There are thirteen people who worked on both shows.
Since a football team has eleven members, someone could do a female version of The Dirty Dozen (1967) where a football team and their soccer coach find themselves having to survive an apocalypse of some kind.
Juno was “fangirling” (as they say) when she told the Shondaland site in July 2021: “Hannah reminds me of Jayne Mansfield. She is a true beauty of a timeless existence that has grace, has curiosity, can nurture, and has wisdom and kindness — and is brilliant at her job. And she laughs if she stumbles in her stilettos. I am so inspired from working with her.”
She also said: “The starting point for me was when me and Hannah met in the ladies’ loo just before doing the first read-through for episode one. We had a moment where we connected with each other, and the rest was history. Life before Hannah Waddingham? I don’t remember it so much.”
Hannah returned the sentiment: “Juno and I are so deeply in love with each other in real life. I know that conversations that we’ve had and ridiculous things that have come up with us and the fact that Juno is very open and vocal about the fact that she fancies me, and I’m always making a joke of it — that’s kind of been added to the show. You know that bit where she says, ‘If you weren’t so tall, I’d reach up and kiss you’? Those kinds of things were added in.”
In March 2024, Juno told the Happy Sad Confused podcast about their first meeting: “It was intimidating and I was jet-lagged and oh my god, coming in to read a comedy show, I was like, 'This is a disaster' and then I went to the bathroom and that's where I met Hannah. She turned and just went “Hi.” That was the beginning of it all because it was just that connection immediately before going in and putting on your big girl face. You already have a buddy, you have a kind of sisterhood immediately - it's one that just grew and grew and one that I don't think I could live without now. I don't want to live without it!”
In July 2022, Hannah told Chris Gardner for The Hollywood Reporter: “She and I have gone more and more insular about our relationship because if you talk about it too much, it can never do justice to what she and I have found together as human beings.”
In an interview for IndieWire in June 2021, Hannah said: “I do think that there was that which was already in the script and then it was very obvious that there was that which they were feeling from us, particularly Jason. It would be interesting to see those original drafts, wouldn’t it, Juno? To know what Rebecca and Keeley were meant to be to each other? And how much our relationship in real life has donated to those characters as well. Because I think it’s sizably more.”
Ironically, Hannah and Juno didn’t play a couple in the series.