A Lead of Her Own

For almost 20 years, Kathryn Hahn has been stealing scenes in plain sight.

On big screens (Captain Fantastic, Step Brothers, Bad Moms, We’re the Millers) and small (Parks and Recreation, Happyish, Kroll Show, Girls, Transparent), she’s excelled as a costar and in those crackerjack character parts.

With that kind of history, it seems almost perverse to now be talking about a breakout role for Hahn. Yet her bravura lead performance in I Love Dick — the 10-episode first season debuts May 12 on Amazon — has the unmistakable feel of an actor taking it to the next level.

“Loosely, loosely, loosely based” (in Hahn’s words) on Chris Kraus’s 1997 alt-feminist novel of the same name, Dick tells the story of Chris (Hahn), a filmmaker who, after one too many professional rejections and passionless nights, finds herself in spiritual crisis. That metaphorical desert merges with a literal one when she accompanies her husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) to an art conference in dusty west Texas.

There, she stumbles upon what she believes is salvation, in the form of the event’s chair, the eponymous Dick (Kevin Bacon). Dazzled by his quicksilver intellect and charisma, she blissfully overlooks his casual misogyny.

“It was like hook, line and sinker,” Hahn says of her initial response to the script. “I was so blown away by this woman’s voice. It’s so bombastic and vulnerable and sexy and funny and brave and messy and complicated and caustic and contradictory. [Chris] doesn’t seem to care if Dick’s just being provocative — she doesn’t really seem to care who Dick is. He’s just a place to put her questions.”

Chris’s obsession, Hahn adds, is “the act of a woman turning [herself] from the object to the subject. She’s casting herself in the role of the protagonist. There’s something really powerful about that.” Her desire, the actress says, reflects “forward movement — it’s not passivity.”

Heady stuff — also hilarious — thanks to Hahn and executive producer Jill Soloway, both accustomed to treading complicated emotional ground (Hahn plays Rabbi Raquel Fein on Soloway’s Transparent). Upon encountering Dick’s tangled thematic content, Hahn recalls, “I thought if anyone would be able to open it up and unravel it, it would be Soloway.”

In casting her in a lead, Soloway also saw the potential in Hahn to play a sophisticated role with a variety of emotional tones — something for which the actress is grateful.

“The rite of passage for a lot of actors, if you’re lucky enough, is to be the best friend in certain romantic comedies,” says Hahn who, after graduating from Northwestern, attended Yale Drama School. “But it always felt like I was leading this double life. There was always a part of me that knew I was much more capable, but I just didn’t know if I would ever have an opportunity to do it.”

That question now finally answered, she offers an inimitably Hahn-esque reaction to her good fortune. “I feel like I’m getting away with murder. It’s nuts.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 3, 2017