“I can’t wait to go home and show my 7-year-old daughter,” the actress Kathryn Hahn said. “‘Look what mommy did!’”
In “Bad Moms,”
a comedy arriving in theaters Friday, Ms. Hahn, 43, plays a mother
unbound, a raunchy libertine loosed from the P.T.A.-enforced strictures
of political and parental correctness. It seemed only on message that on
a trip to New York to promote the film, she found herself flat on her
back at New York Adorned, a Second Avenue piercing parlor, a needle homing in on her upper ear.
Though
now, she added afterward, in a taxi headed toward her former New York
neighborhood for a drink and a poke around, “I’m going to be typecast as
mother-with-piercings.” A tiny new diamond sparkled in the upper part
of her cartilage.
Ms.
Hahn, late of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, is now Ms. Hahn of Silver Lake,
Los Angeles, a transition that is a mark of career success.
Since
leaving New York for Hollywood more than a decade ago, Ms. Hahn, Yale
School of Drama-trained and screwball-practiced, has worked steadily.
After several years on “Crossing Jordan,” an early-aughts NBC
procedural, she has appeared mostly in film and TV comedies, usually in
supporting roles but always with gusto.
As
a result, she is recognizable though occasionally hard to place. Some
know her as Rabbi Raquel, the much-suffering moral compass of
“Transparent” on Amazon; others as one of the campy stewardesses of the Broadway revival of “Boeing-Boeing.”
Three
young women who stopped Ms. Hahn on the street and requested selfies
recognized her as Alice, the married woman seducing John C. Reilly in
“Step Brothers.” Ms. Hahn said the role she is most often stopped for
was an ongoing guest appearance as a hard-charging political consultant
on “Parks and Recreation.”
Deposited
on 10th Avenue, Ms. Hahn strolled toward the building on 49th Street
where she and her husband, Ethan Sandler, an actor and writer/producer
on “New Girl,” spent eight years in a fourth-floor walk-up.
She
lived the archetypal struggling New York actress life: working as a
receptionist by day (at Garren New York, the high-end hair salon),
briefly waitressing at Joe Allen, the unofficial canteen of Broadway,
and sending out endless head shots wherever she could. (This method
resulted in the acquisition of a New Jersey agent and a gig passing out
bagel sandwiches for Dunkin’ Donuts.)
On
the stoop outside her old apartment building stood John Matejas, 78,
enjoying the sunshine, his tank top tucked into belted jean shorts. His
eyes widened when he saw Ms. Hahn; he had been the building’s super when
she lived there.
He
punched numbers into his clamshell phone and summoned his wife,
Minerva, down from upstairs. Another set of eyes widened; tears came to
eyes.
“For
us, she is like our daughter,” Mr. Matejas said. (His own daughter had
given birth to her own daughter in the years since Ms. Hahn had been a
resident.) Ms. Matejas added that they heard about all her movies.
After
numbers were exchanged and photos taken to send to Ms. Hahn’s husband,
and promises to stay in touch, Ms. Hahn clambered down the stairs. She
agreed cheerfully to an alfresco palm reading by a psychic set up at a
curbside card table, who advised her she needed more positivity in her
life.
Actually,
things are looking pretty positive for Ms. Hahn, the rare Hollywood
actress whose prospects have been improving, rather than declining,
after 40.
Her
leading role in “Bad Moms” arrives just before another star turn, as a
lovestruck, unhappily married filmmaker in “I Love Dick,” an Amazon
pilot based on Chris Kraus’s postmodern novel of the same name, by the
“Transparent” creator, Jill Soloway.
Ms.
Soloway wrote the part of Rabbi Raquel for Ms. Hahn, which has made her
a minor heartthrob in the Jewish community, although Ms. Hahn,
surprising to many, was raised Roman Catholic.
She has often played Jewish characters onscreen (in “Afternoon Delight,” too, as well as Showtime’s “Happyish”), and Ms. Soloway “just refuses to believe” that she isn’t Jewish, Ms. Hahn said with a laugh. (Her husband is.)
“Sometimes
it takes an outsider to really get inside,” she said. “They did have to
walk me through some of the Hebrew. It doesn’t just roll off the
tongue.”
Sitting over watermelon salad and bread with local butter at the Marshal, a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant, Ms. Hahn, joined by her cousin, George, a sometime fellow-actor, style writer and neighborhood resident, recalled their struggling earlier years, auditioning and commiserating.
“‘Backstage,’ Equity showcases,” Mr. Hahn said, recalling listings for “brief nudity, no pay.”
“Can’t wait to audition for that show,” Ms. Hahn replied.
Though Ms. Hahn no longer has to contend with brief nudity, no pay, “I feel like I still have a way’s to go,” she said.
Hollywood
is still getting a handle on her. “I know that I don’t necessarily fit
the specific, you know, mold,” she said, drolly. “I certainly am not
consciously trying to avoid big roles. At all.”
More
may be coming. “If I could write sonnets,” the Times critic Manohla
Dargis wrote, reviewing “Bad Moms,” “I would write one about Ms. Hahn.”
But for any casting directors still seeking clarity:
“The
biggest inspirations to me were those imperfect ’70s heroines,” Ms.
Hahn said. “Not, like, camera-ready: Teri Garr, Gena Rowlands. A little
bit messy and a little bit unwaxed.”