Fashion isn’t always practical… but it needs to be for a hitwoman.
In the new buddy-comedy action series Ride or Die, streaming now on Prime Video, Emmy winner Hannah Waddingham stars as Judith, an international assassin who thinks that her biggest problem is enforced retirement by the covert organization to which she’s devoted her life. By the end of the series premiere, however, she realizes her real dilemma: a mystery person from her past has her in their crosshairs, forcing her to come clean to her best friend of 25 years, Debbie (Oscar winner Octavia Spencer), about her real profession. Oh yeah, and Debbie’s also in danger.
For Waddingham, establishing Judith as a force to reckoned with was so important that she personally designed the character’s gown for the premiere’s black tie event that ends with a body count.
“I wanted to make something that, on face value, if you looked at her quickly, it’s just a normal evening dress,” the Ted Lasso star tells Gold Derby. “But if you looked in detail, you’d be like, ‘Why has she got zips at the front and the back, and absolutely bitten-down fingernails in a bag that doubles as a knuckle duster?’”
Those thigh-high zips in the curve-hugging black sequin stunner come in handy when Judith needs to sidestep across the ledge of building, hurriedly grab a hilariously tipsy Debbie, and flee the scene through the kitchen — where she does hand-to-pan combat with two men giving chase.
“If I’m honest, I found it quite intimidating that that was the first main fight scene,” Waddingham confesses. “I thought, ‘I have to prove myself. I have to make it look like this is a walk in the park for her.’ Judith has put her jewel [Debbie] in the cupboard, she’s given her the bag, and as quickly as she shuts the door, she’s grabbing things off to the side. There’s the liquid movement into all of that. I needed to make it believable so that every audience member went, ‘Okay, she’s fine with stunts.’”
Once Debbie sobers us, the lawyer — who has back-burnered her own career to help her British politician husband David (Jamie Parker) rise, only to be asked for a divorce on the way to that black-tie event — doesn’t take long to start saving herself.
“Isn’t that a characteristic of most women, we have to adapt,” the Oscar-winning actress says. “That’s what I loved about these characters. Their lives are, if you think about it, truly mirroring each other.
“There’s a threat to both their marriages — Debbie’s actual marriage and Judith’s job, which is her love,” Spencer continues. “And then the thing that matters most, their friendship, is in peril. There’s a lot of adapting that has to happen. There’s a lot of pain. And I love that we take the entire season to allow both characters to grow in whatever direction that they’re going to grow and we don’t pull any punches.”
Their journey will be complicated not only by the fallout of David’s shady dealings for Debbie and the mark on Judith, but also by the head of Judith’s organization, The Director (Bill Nighy), who makes his first appearance in the second hour to tell his prize pupil she’s grown weak.
For Nighy, a self-proclaimed “espionage freak” who’s read and watched every good (and bad) spy series, not much additional research was required for the role. “It was very, very carefully presented and described in the script: the tone of the man, the quiet talk, the kind of merciless enough,” he says. “And then then you have the revelations later in the series, that there is more to him than originally meets the eye.”
The Director spends much of his time in his über-stylish office, so Nighy does a considerable amount of phone acting as the eight-episode season continues. The Oscar nominee laughs when we ask how many takes it took him to angrily hang up a corded desk phone. “Maybe half a dozen ,” he admits. “It’s funny how holding what used to be a normal phone is very odd now. You’ve sort of forgotten the way of doing it. But I do still love those phones.”
