In her new show I Am Hannah, Gemma Chan is at her most emotionally vulnerable. The drama – one of Channel 4’s three-part anthology series – is a muted, slice-of-life look at a thirty-something single woman weighed down by the social pressure of finding a husband and starting a family. As the title character, Chan lays herself bare, delivering a heartfelt performance that resonates with a sonorous verisimilitude. “It was like taking off a layer of skin,” she says. “I felt like my nerves were on the outside. It was very raw and vulnerable and real. There was nowhere to hide.” Indeed, the episode is intimately shot, predominantly framing Hannah in close-ups that linger on her visibly clenched jaw and furrowed chin when a date quizzes her about her ticking biological clock, her tear-filled eyes after meeting a friend’s newborn.

Courtesy of Channel 4

I Am Hannah feels close to home for the actress the way her most recent roles – playing an alien warrior in Captain Marvel and an Elizabethan countess for Mary Queen of Scots – just don’t seem to. Chan’s link to this material is the most deep-rooted of her career so far, as she helped shape the episode’s largely improvised script. “It was the first time I’d been involved so intimately from the conception stage of the story,” she says. “Dominic [Savage, the director] and I knew fairly early on that the piece was going to be in the arena of societal ideas of motherhood and touching into fertility. I drew inspiration from discussions I’ve had with my girlfriends and used my imagination. To be honest, when I watch it back, I think where did that [dialogue] come from? It was kind of a mishmash of things.”

Courtesy of Channel 4

Chan may have spun fiction for the show but, as she has previously stated, “it’s drawing on a lot of me”. Revealingly, her most constant refrain during our conversation is the word “gosh”, softly uttered to bemoan the baby-making expectations women are saddled with.

“If you look to the not-too-distant past, it was just a given that you got married and had kids,” she explains. “I feel like we have more freedom these days, but we don’t necessarily feel as free as we should to make different choices for ourselves. We need to be less quick to judge, less quick to project our own anxieties and fears onto others. If we saw a wider spectrum of honest portrayals of women who have made different kinds of choices, maybe the more accepting we’ll become and the less judgmental we’ll be.” This judgement follows Hannah throughout the show. Despite new mothers in their thirties now outnumbering those in their twenties, Hannah worries that she is “a bit of a freak compared to other women she knows” and that she’ll be “left behind before she figures her shit out”.

I Am Hannah accumulates seemingly innocuous details to highlight the extent to which our heroine's status as single and childless has created a disjunct between her and those she holds dear. The camera zooming in on her mother’s wedding band as she comforts her overwhelmed daughter at a fertility clinic only exacerbates her otherness, while the attention it affords her unmarried friend’s bright eyes as she imagines an idyllic white-picket-fenced future intensifies her grief that this vision feels so out of reach. Wordless reminders of Hannah’s failure to reproduce are omnipresent in the episode: her painful daily walk through a park of rambunctious infants being the most harrowing, with Chan’s face fixed in a morose expression as she walks by.

Courtesy of Channel 4

Hannah’s frustrated motherhood also beleaguers her love life, an inertia-inducing series of swipe-right meet-ups. Chan remains diplomatic on this algorithm approach to modern romance. “Well I’ve never used a dating app,” she admits. “On the one hand, I think it’s great. You get to meet people out of your immediate social or work circle, and I have friends who have met their future partners that way. But there are horror stories as well. It’s just the complete unknown, you really don’t know what you’re going to get.” What her character gets is nothing short of nightmarish: one man verbally abuses Hannah for her laissez-faire attitude to having children, another physically assaults her in a dimly lit bar. Through these ill-fated encounters, I Am Hannah sheds light on the apparent hopelessness of finding a partner in a dating landscape where people are disposable, their replacement a mere thumb-tap away.

Courtesy of Channel 4

After starring in big-budget movies this year (which, incidentally, helped her become anointed into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last month), Chan was actively seeking a project that relied less on set pieces and more on these uneasy interpersonal relationships. “I was craving doing something more intimate and smaller-scale with a tiny crew, mainly being about what’s going on between the actors,” she says. “Working on I Am Hannah was a completely intense, immersive experience that wasn’t like anything else I’ve ever done, which was terrifying but also satisfying to be able to go there and inhabit a character that way.”

However uncomfortable she may have been without the crutches of period costume or blue body paint, Gemma Chan has produced her best work by plundering the personal, creating a thoughtful representation of navigating social mores as a thirty-something. In a world where single women are still culturally coded as pitiable or suspicious, such honest depictions are always welcome.

‘I Am Hannah’, the third of a three-part drama anthology series, airs on Tuesday 6 August at 10pm on Channel 4.





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