your smallscreen spirit animal
Kathryn Hahn is among the most watchable, wonderful players on TV. And with her next series, I Love Dick, she’ll (finally) be a bona-fide star, too
Actress Kathryn Hahn is finally getting the kudos she deserves.
When Kathryn Hahn says, “I’ve been pretending to be normal for so much of my life,” you can’t help but think, what a waste! Over the past five years, the actress has become a sort of stealth TV icon, the kind you’re thrilled to see pop up in whatever amazing show you happen to be watching – Girls, Transparent, Parks And Recreation
– because you know you’re in for something hilarious, totally lacking in vanity, deeply human and occasionally weird. (She’s worked that skill set on the big screen, too, most recently in Bad
Moms, in which she matter-offactly demonstrated how to handle an uncircumcised penis – using a hoodiewearing Kristen Bell.) Now, she’s filming the first show in which she’ll be the unequivocal star, the Amazonproduced series I Love Dick. “Working, I can be my truest self. I don’t know how healthy that is,” she says. “My therapist is like, ‘Why haven’t you seen me?’”
Hahn’s best is also her most shambolic – her lips stained red with wine during an epic meltdown in the 2013 film Afternoon Delight, or when she had a full-on spiritual crisis as Transparent’s empathetic rabbi, Raquel. Raw, vulnerable moments bring out her incandescence, so much so that fans of Transparent are in a kind of pre-mourning, worried that her technically tangential character has escaped the Pfefferman clan for good. “She hasn’t died,” says Hahn, who, for the record, has been touched by the concern.
Transparent isn’t the first time Hahn started on a project as a mere planet but became its
sun. For 14 years, she’s been stealing scenes in comedies like How To Lose A Guy In 10
Days and Step Brothers. Then, a few years ago, directorproducer Jill Soloway spotted her at a farmer’s market and tapped her for
Afternoon Delight and Transparent. (Hahn didn’t learn until later that she’d been noticed, but guesses she was in line for pupusas at the time.) That slow-burn radiance is also why
Girls created a character specifically for her. It’s why, at the start of her career, her guest role as a quirky grief counsellor on Crossing Jordan was extended, seeing her appear in all six seasons.
Frankly, most TV shows would be better with Hahn in them, but for now the Soloway-produced Dick has dibs. Her role as Chris, a filmmaker drawn into an obsessive, cerebral affair with the series’ titular academic (played by Kevin Bacon), earned her rave reviews when Amazon posted the pilot; the full first season premieres in the US next month. “It’s incredible to be able to show a woman’s emotion and desire without apology,” she says. The performance is utterly relatable and convincingly unhinged – a Hahn specialty. “She’s everything that I would be: rash, self-hating, contradictory, brilliant.”
As for her career, Hahn says, “I feel like I’m getting away with something because I haven’t been pigeonholed. I just feel worked for the first time in my creative life. I feel investigated. It’s why I got into this mess in the first place.” And for that, we’re grateful.