To prepare for playing a witch on television, Kathryn Hahn called a real one. They talked every week leading up to shooting Agatha All Along, a miniseries that feels like a live-action version of a Simpsons Halloween special: There’s comedy, horror, parody, and adventure. Hahn says that she learned three big lessons from their conversations:
- Witches need a coven: “A witch can’t exist on her own.”
- Witches are connected to the natural world: “That’s why you see so many of them in the woods, because they get their power from standing barefoot on the earth and their connection with the moon and trees bending at their will and all that stuff, which is scary stuff. But it’s also beautiful.”
- Witches contain multitudes: “There’s a lot of tropes, especially in Disney, and I love Disney, that a witch is a certain thing. There’s the princess and the witch. There’s the good girl and the bad girl. Very binary. But a witch gives room to all, and there’s all lives in one person.”
Remarkably, Hahn took all of this in stride. Like with every part she’s taken on, whether it’s a small role or the lead of a Marvel show, she dived in deep. That’s because Hahn isn’t just a character actor, she’s a character-actor—someone whose unique personality can elevate anything. “You can see her as this really wild comedian who just makes you laugh harder than anybody, and you can also, I think, see her as one of the greatest actresses of our time,” says filmmaker Joey Soloway, Hahn’s longtime friend and collaborator. “She’s so many things.”
Whether she’s a sexually voracious housewife in Step Brothers or a thoughtful new-age rabbi in Transparent, Hahn has a way of physically going for it that helps her steal whatever scene she’s in. “It makes sense, once you know her, how willing she is to open her chest cavity to the world,” Agatha All Along creator Jac Schaeffer says. “It is extremely rare.”
But even after Hahn spent the past two decades lighting up a genre-spanning list of movies and TV series, it feels like the world still needs to be periodically reminded of her magic. There’s likely a reason for that. As she moved up the call sheet, Hollywood’s bottom dropped out. She starred in critically praised shows, such as I Love Dick and Mrs. Fletcher, that studios quickly and unceremoniously moved on from. “I was doing work that meant a lot to me but was not really seen,” says Hahn, who turned 51 in July. “I have a lot of single-season shows that maybe weren’t planned out as a single season. I was very proud of all of it.” But nothing seemed to last. “There was never the thing,” she says.
Hahn doesn’t know if Agatha All Along, which premieres today on Disney+, will be the thing. But maybe more importantly, it’s her thing. After Hahn’s standout performance in 2021 as a nefarious neighbor in WandaVision, Marvel Studios’ first crack at television, the show’s creator knew she wanted to build a project in her image. “We’ve always said that the tone of the show is Kathryn Hahn,” Schaeffer says.
Hahn didn’t expect any of this. Until recently, she never could’ve imagined bringing the centuries-old comic book witch Agatha Harkness to life. It was not a spell she thought she’d be able to cast. “I guess this is the modern trajectory,” Hahn says, smiling. “It goes from best friend, quirky best friend, pregnant best friend, mom, horny mom, horny divorced mom, witch.”
Jac Schaeffer needed a classic TV neighbor: a combo of Mrs. Roper from Three’s Company and Rhoda from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, mixed with a little bit of Mona from Who’s the Boss? It was 2019, and she was developing Marvel’s first superhero sitcom. But this character was also secretly an antagonist, Schaeffer says, “so there needed to be a performer who could drop the mask and then have teeth.”
Hahn hadn’t heard about WandaVision yet, but she was very familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Around that time, she had a meeting with Marvel Studios executives Louis D’Esposito and Mary Livanos about potential projects. It went well. “The next day I got a call saying, ‘We have a part, and we’d love to talk to you about it,’” Hahn says. “I heard afterward that it was my hair. I hadn’t brushed my hair. And it was so wild that they were like, ‘Ah, her hair.’ I had to tell my agent of forever, I was like, ‘See, after all those years of telling me to brush my hair, it finally paid off, me not brushing my hair.’”
Directed by Matt Shakman, an old friend of Hahn and her husband, WandaVision was a knotty, daring-for-Marvel show about the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), working through her grief by trapping herself; the love of her life, Vision (Paul Bettany); and an entire New Jersey town in a series of fake sitcoms modeled after series made from the ’50s up through the early 2000s. Of course, nothing is what it seems, and cracks quickly begin to show in Wanda’s setup before all hell breaks loose.
Schaeffer was looking for someone to play Agnes, who lived next to Wanda and Vision. At the outset, the audience didn’t know that she was actually Agatha Harkness, a power-hungry witch who debuted in an issue of Fantastic Four all the way back in 1969. “The Agatha character was tacked on,” Schaeffer says.
But that was before Schaeffer heard Hahn might be available. “We were like, ‘Could we really? Could we maybe?’” The idea of casting someone with Hahn’s résumé in what was then a small part seemed a tad far-fetched, but Schaeffer wanted to pitch her on it anyway. After accepting an invitation to the WandaVision writers room, Hahn sat next to Schaeffer and listened. “She was right there, looking at me with her blue, blue eyes, really dialed in on what I was saying,” Schaeffer says. “My memories of that day are all in close-up because she’s got such an intensity to her. But it’s warm, that’s the thing.”
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
Hahn was intrigued by the Wanda-Agatha relationship. “I would be, in a way, the Ghost of Christmas Past, leading her, teasing her,” she says. “And then ultimately trying to break her down to get her power.” As soon as Hahn came on board, the role grew. “There was just an abundance of opportunity to peel back layers,” Schaeffer says. “And that’s what she brought.”
Around that time, Hahn was shooting the HBO miniseries I Know This Much Is True. The star of the show, Academy Award nominee Mark Ruffalo, also happened to be in the middle of his MCU run playing the Hulk. When she asked him about the experience, he told her it was life-changing. Making billion-dollar blockbusters allowed him, she says, to also take on “these incredible, tiny, smaller projects.” Plus, it was a blast. “The scale of it is so mammoth that it is almost Greek,” she says. “It felt fun to play in this huge scale.”
When WandaVision started filming in Atlanta, Olsen helped Hahn get acclimated to the world of green screens, wire work, and constrictive costumes. Hahn recalls looking at Bettany’s skin-tight suit and wondering how he managed not to faint. “I was in awe,” she says. “And I remember Lizzie walking me through what I needed because I had no skin showing basically at all. Like crinoline after crinoline after crinoline. She convinced me to wear a cooling suit, which is this weird vest you put on with a cord, and then someone will pump in cold water every once in a while. And then the wire work is my dream. I have no fear in those. I love it so much. I used to do trapeze. Not successfully. But I don’t mind it.”
The scale of the show was slightly less huge than the Infinity Saga, but no less fun. “We used to joke all the time. [Olsen’s] like, ‘Oh my God, the Avengers’ parking lot was so much different than this,’” Hahn says. “I would roll in in my dirty Honda Odyssey, and she would roll in in her dirty Prius. It already felt like it was from a different vein than typical Marvel.”
From the first episode, a black-and-white I Love Lucy–style parody, Hahn’s performance popped. It reminded Schaeffer of how memorable Hahn was in the ’50s drama Revolutionary Road. “Seeing her slip into that physicality and the vocal tone of that era, it didn’t surprise me, but it was so delightful,” Schaeffer says. “To see her bring that expertise and that skill set to the sitcom space and the golden age of TV space was just delicious. And the hair, and the look, and the nails. As a fan, I was like, ‘Look at the icon go.’”
WandaVision was an immediate hit when it premiered in January 2021, and Hahn was lauded for her umpteenth breakout moment. A single shot of her character exaggeratedly winking became a meme. And her song, “Agatha All Along,” in which the character’s duplicitousness is finally revealed to the audience, went viral.
Since it was still the middle of the pandemic and Hahn isn’t on social media, she remembers it took her awhile to grasp Agatha’s popularity. Then Rian Johnson cast her in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. While filming the movie in Europe, she got a call from D’Esposito. “How’d you like your own show?” he asked.
Hahn was shocked. But if there’s one thing she’s learned after decades in show business, it’s that success is rarely linear. “You never know what’s going to lead to what,” she says. “Something could just happen that has nothing to do with anything you’ve done before. Talk about chaos magic.”
Hahn is a proud theater kid and has been since she was a Catholic school kindergartner with the same earnest urge to perform as Mary Katherine Gallagher. Growing up in a middle-class family with two younger brothers in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, she’d spend afternoons in faraway imaginary places. “I would play pretend, and my mom really cultivated this—just the deepest pretend,” Hahn says. “I would come home from school, just get lost, and then we’d be called in for dinner.”
Soon after Hahn started taking acting classes at the Cleveland Play House, she got cast on a local children’s TV show called Hickory Hideout. Her costars were squirrel puppets. This, she decided back then, was the life for her. Anything else would be playing pretend. “I didn’t have grandiose star visions,” she says. “I just wanted to perform. It was the safest place I felt, when the curtain came up and down, because it was completely my time. I was in control.”
Hahn’s path to becoming a professional actor, though, wasn’t so simple. She says it was paved with self-doubt and “a mountain of debt.” After graduating from Northwestern University, where she played Ophelia in Hamlet, she and her future husband, the writer-producer Ethan Sandler, moved to New York City. In the late ’90s, she attended Yale School of Drama and appeared in off-off-Broadway plays, which didn’t pay her bills. Service jobs did, barely. “You felt completely invisible,” Hahn says. “It was just output of money and no input. You couldn’t get traction anywhere. You would just work so hard on auditions and just push back those voices that said, ‘You’ll never get this. You’re just wasting your time.’”
Then, around the turn of the millennium, Hahn auditioned for a new NBC procedural called Crossing Jordan. Tim Kring, the show’s creator, remembers that day well. “Casting was always an awkward thing,” he says. “But then there’s an exception to that with somebody like Kathryn, who walks in and you are instantly aware that you are at the beginning of something pretty amazing. When you see somebody like that, they walk in and who they are, before they open their mouth [they’re] compelling and watchable. And that happens incredibly rarely. When it does, it’s an extraordinary experience.”
Hahn was cast as grief counselor Lily Lebowski, her first major TV role. As Schaeffer did years later, Kring immediately thought about beefing up what was initially planned as a small part. “The thing about Kathryn, and it’s what makes her such a great improv actor, is that she is 100 percent fully present when you’re with her,” Kring says. “When she says, ‘Hello, how are you?’ she means it so sincerely that it’s almost startling. And she has enormous empathy as a person. So that empathy met with a character on the show who was this grief counselor. You saw her face on-screen, and you knew that she really cared about what she was saying.”
For Hahn, a self-proclaimed “girl from the Midwest who just takes everything at face value,” moving to Los Angeles was surreal. It was not, she learned, wall-to-wall glamor. The network put her up in the Oakwood Apartments near Universal Studios and rented her a purple Suzuki Sidekick. “I thought that my world encompassed the stretch of Ventura [Boulevard] that went by Vivid studios,” she says, “which every time I drove by, I’d be like, ‘Porn happens in there.’ I was so shocked.”
Eventually, Hahn got used to L.A. and life as a TV series regular. The gig helped her pay off her student loans and taught her how a Hollywood production worked. “It was like film boot camp,” says Hahn, who credits late costar Miguel Ferrer with showing her the ropes.
Crossing Jordan premiered in 2001 and aired for six seasons. Two years into the show’s run, Kring remembers Hahn approaching him and his producing partner and asking, apologetically, if they could adjust the shooting schedule for her. She was hoping to take a week off to shoot a handful of scenes in a movie with Will Ferrell. “We were like, ‘Of course we’re going to let you do this,’” Kring says.
But as she went off to make Anchorman, Kring felt a brief rush of panic. “I don’t know if we’re ever seeing her again,” he recalls saying at the time. “Because they’re going to fall in love with her.”
Kring was half right. Hahn didn’t leave Crossing Jordan, but the comedy world did fall in love with her. By the early 2000s, she’d found her way into rom-coms like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!, and The Holiday. After directing her in Anchorman—she’s the big-haired lady who tells Veronica Corningstone that Ron Burgundy will read a-ny-thin-guh on a teleprompter—Adam McKay cast her in Step Brothers as Alice, the seemingly demure wife of Adam Scott’s Derek who grows deeply infatuated with Derek’s stepbrother, John C. Reilly’s Dale.
Working with Ferrell, Reilly, and McKay gave Hahn the chance to do what she loves: go wild in a way that surprises even her costars. “There was an allowance to go there that was thrilling,” she says. “I wanted to shock them.”
“Someone asked me, ‘What are some times on set where a scene happens and spontaneously everyone knows it’s great?’” McKay once told me. “The big one I remember was the first take Kathryn Hahn did where she comes at Dale in that doorway and is like, ‘I want to roll you into a little ball and shove you up my vagina.’ The first take she did of that, when I said ‘cut,’ the whole crew spontaneously applauded. I remember Mary Steenburgen came over and gave her a hug and said congratulations.”
Hahn says that she enjoyed doing “big-swing comedy”—see Parks and Recreation, Our Idiot Brother, Wanderlust, and Bad Moms—but was still holding out hope for the kind of roles that would take advantage of her versatility. The type that actors she looked up to, like Teri Garr and Gena Rowlands and Dianne Wiest, played with a mix of humor, intensity, and vulnerability. “Everyone can recognize some sort of humanity in each one of those people,” Hahn says. “That they’re willing to show every bit of themselves emotionally and in such a raw way is a part of their appeal or attractiveness.” The problem was that Hollywood rarely seemed to offer women even approaching middle age those roles anymore.
But in the early 2010s, Joey Soloway was preparing to direct their first movie, Afternoon Delight, about a suburban mom desperately trying to revive her dormant marriage. Several of Soloway’s showbiz friends suggested Hahn for the lead. “I didn’t know who they were talking about,” says Soloway, who assumed they meant Jessica Hahn.
A couple of nights later, Soloway was—they swear coincidentally—watching Hung, an HBO dramedy about a cash-strapped guy who turns to sex work. In the episode, they recall, there was a startlingly intense sex scene featuring a pregnant woman. That was Hahn.
A few days later, Soloway ran into Hahn at an L.A. farmer’s market. “I went up to her, and I was like, ‘I just saw you on Hung. You’re amazing,’” Soloway says. “And then she was like, ‘Kathryn Hahn.’ I’m like, ‘This is not Jessica Hahn. This is somebody else.’”
Afternoon Delight was Hahn’s first leading movie role. And watching Hahn and her costar Juno Temple sharing a cigarette in a downtown L.A. alley while filming their first scene together, Soloway knew they made the right choice. “From there, I think I became a director,” they say. “I just wanted to watch what was happening.”
Afternoon Delight led to Hahn and Soloway’s second collaboration: Transparent. In the Amazon series, which Soloway was inspired to create after their parent came out as trans, Hahn plays Rabbi Raquel Fein. Hahn’s husband is Jewish, and my Transparent-loving mom thinks she’s Jewish, but she actually grew up Catholic. So as usual, Hahn did her research, working with L.A. Rabbi Susan Goldberg to make sure that her performance felt as real as possible.
Verisimilitude has always been important to Hahn. In 2018, she starred opposite Paul Giamatti in Private Life, a Netflix movie about a 40-something couple facing infertility. Hahn did homework for the role, though director Tamara Jenkins got the sense that she innately understood how emotionally fraught the process of trying to have a child can be.
These days, Jenkins still marvels at Hahn’s willingness to truly go there when a moment calls for it. There’s a scene in the movie in which Hahn’s and Giamatti’s characters are furiously cleaning up their apartment to prepare for a social worker’s visit. In the script, the couple argues about whether a painting of a nude woman on their wall is appropriate for a meeting about adopting a child. Jenkins wondered whether, during the discussion, Hahn shouldn’t be wearing pants. “It’s in fact so domestic and quotidian,” Jenkins says, “which is why it’s funny.”
Jenkins nervously asked Hahn if she’d do it: “I said, ‘I have an idea …’” Hahn immediately said yes. Jenkins even asked once more for good measure and got the exact same answer. “I meant no pants, period,” Jenkins says. “No underwear. Nothing.”
Hahn did it. And that was the first day of filming.
Have no fear, Hahn Hive: Her decision to join the mostly family-friendly Marvel world hasn’t drained her main superpowers. Leading up to filming Agatha All Along, Schaeffer says that Hahn and Agatha started to blend together in her mind. And during rehearsals, when Schaeffer tried to watch Hahn’s Hulu show, Tiny Beautiful Things, she had to stop. “I totally underestimated the amount of physical prep Kathryn had done to embody Agatha that when I saw her as this other character, it just made me really uncomfortable,” Schaeffer says. “I was like, ‘I’m looking at somebody wearing a Kathryn suit.’ It was just really good acting, but it just freaked me out.”
Hahn admits she’s still surprised by the fact that she’s the lead of a miniseries that’s being advertised on billboards in Times Square and all over L.A. “I’m telling you, this was not in my field of vision,” she says. “I just thought that was a different genre than I was built for. You know what I mean? I never considered myself someone that had to get fit or all those things you typically imagine go with that territory. And it’s (a) amazing that that has not been asked of me and (b) that Kevin [Feige] et al. has just been psyched by me as who I am.”
Hahn has been, and always will be, a character actor. But once in a while, someone like her gets a chance to have the spotlight to herself. “This totally crazy show that is a total high-wire act, that has all the comedy and all the drama and is horror and also a warm and fuzzy found-family story, of course it’s all centered on Kathryn Hahn,” Schaeffer says. “It’s like she’s been training for this her entire life, and I and everybody I know is ready to show up for it.”
It may not be a coincidence that the most high-profile role of Kathryn Hahn’s career so far is a witch. “I think she’s literally got some magical powers,” Soloway says. Whether we knew it or not, she’s had them all along.
“I feel like I’m in the portal to the next phase of my life as a woman,” Hahn says. “I think that the act of becoming a witch is the next chapter, where you can have these feelings that you’re told not to for all these years. Rage. All the things that we could do when we were little girls, all the things that were squeezed out of us, seem to feel like they are allowed as a witch.”
