Kathryn Hahn: "I've Been Pretending to Be Normal for So Much of My Life"
When actress Kathryn Hahn says, "I've been pretending to be normal for so much of my life," one can't help but think, What a waste! Over the past five years, Hahn has become a sort of stealth TV icon, the kind of woman 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 wildly hilarious, totally lacking in vanity, deeply human, and occasionally weird. (She's worked that skill set to strong effect on the big screen, too, most recently in last year's Bad Moms, in which she matter-of-factly demonstrated how to handle an uncircumcised penis-using a hoodie-wearing Kristen Bell as her facsimile.) We meet at a café near the L.A. lot where she's filming the first show in which she'll be the unequivocal star, the upcoming Amazon half-hour series I Love Dick. "Working, I can be my truest self. I don't know how healthy that is," she says, letting out a quick snort as she pushes banana bread around her plate. "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 near the end of the 2013 film Afternoon Delight, or as Transparent's empathic rabbi, Raquel, who endured an epic spiritual crisis late last season. Raw, vulnerable moments bring out Hahn's incandescence, so much so that fans of the Emmy-winning series are already in a kind of pre-mourning, worried that her technically tangential but soulfully crucial character (incidentally, the least narcissistic one on the show) has escaped the Pfefferman clan for the last time. "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'd been stealing scenes as a character actress in comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Step Brothers. Then, six years ago, director-producer 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 on line for pupusas-now a Transparent in-joke-at the time.) That slow-burn radiance is also why Girls created a season-one character (the mother of Jessa's two babysitting charges) specifically for her. It's why, way back at the beginning of her career, her guest role as a quirky grief counselor on the medical procedural Crossing Jordan was expanded to recur (no doubt there are Hahn completists out there who have watched all six seasons).
Frankly, most shows on television would be better with Hahn in them, but for now the Soloway-produced Dick has dibs. Playing the role of Chris Kraus, a real-life feminist author drawn into an obsessive, cerebral affair with the series' titular academic (Kevin Bacon), is a revelatory part for Hahn, who earned rhapsodic reviews when Amazon posted the pilot this past summer; the full first season is due in May. "It's incredible to be able to show a woman's emotion and desire without apology," she says of playing Kraus, a New York filmmaker who moves to Marfa, Texas, after her husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), gets a fellowship at the fictional Marfa Institute. The resulting performance is at once utterly relatable and convincingly unhinged-a Hahn specialty, to be sure: "She's everything that I would be: rash, self-hating, contradictory, brilliant."
Careerwise, in general, "I feel like I'm getting away with something because I haven't been pigeonholed one way or another," she says. "[But] Jill saw something in there and kind of busted open this door. 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 are grateful.
This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of ELLE.
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