‘There’s a lot of pressure on women’
Hollywood star Gemma Chan, 36, tackles society’s expectations of women in I Am Hannah...
So Gemma, tell us about your character, Hannah…
She’s 36, she lives in London and works in marketing in a job she’s very good at but not feeling fulfilled by. She’s not in a relationship when we meet her and is feeling under pressure. Most of her female friends have coupled off and had kids, and she’s questioning it. It’s an exploration of both the external and internal pressures on women in terms of what society expects.
Was there cultural pressure on Hannah to have children?
There’s definitely pressure from her mother. She grew up in a single parent family with her mother. I think her mother has strong ideas about what Hannah should be doing, possibly to compensate for mistakes she feels she made in her life.
Why did you want to tell her story?
I wanted to tell a story about a woman struggling to free herself from expectation. There’s a lot of pressure on women around the idea of what it means to be a mother, what it means to be a woman if you don’t want to be a mother, or if you can’t be a mother.
What’s your own experience of this pressure?
I think it’s crazy how getting pregnant is drilled into you as the worst thing that could happen to you when you’re a teenager or in your early twenties. Then suddenly when you hit your mid-thirties, the message is that you’re running out of time! You essentially have a few years when you’re supposed to meet the right person, settle down and start a family. I think that can be quite unrealistic.
The filming is improvised. Have you worked in that way before?
I’ve done a bit at drama school, but since I’ve been working professionally as an actor, this was the only time. On the one hand it was terrifying because you didn’t have that safety net of a script. But on the other hand, what you can get out of it can be incredibly rich and truthful.
I Am Hannah, 6 August, Channel 4