The versatile actor has stolen scenes in everything from Girls to Revolutionary Road – making an effortless transition from screwball comedy into complex drama. But she is only just beginning to get the kind of roles she really wants

It’s 10am in Los Angeles and Kathryn Hahn is sitting in her car, having just dropped her children off at school. Only recently did her young son and daughter cotton on to what their 41-year-old mother does for a living. “We were having dinner,” she tells me on the phone, “and my son said: ‘So you’re an actor, right?’ I was, like, ‘Yeah.’ He said: ‘Show me your act, then.’ ... Boy, he really put me on the spot. I tried to bust out some dinosaur noises for him; told a joke. I gotta say, it was not impressive. It fell flat.”

What she really needs, I suggest, is some Pixar voice work. “That would swing it. Though my kids did see me in that Disney movie, Tomorrowland. They were very excited that Mummy got her head blown off and turned out to be a robot. It was much better than when they saw me on billboards with some strange man. ‘Oh look, Mummy’s in bed with a man who isn’t Daddy and the whole of Los Angeles can see …’”

Suddenly she lets out a little gasp. “I’ve been parked here the whole time we’ve been speaking,” she says, “and now there are a couple of uniformed officers circling the car.” There’s a brief moment of silence while she keeps an eye on their movements. “I’m just wondering if I put enough money in the meter …” Another pause. “No, it’s fine. They’re gone. We’re all good.”

While it’s nice that she didn’t get into any trouble, the world has now been denied an entertaining and not-untypical Kathryn Hahn scene that might have been. Chances are the cops would have recognised her. Most likely from one of the raucous comedies to which she has added pep over the past decade. Maybe Step Brothers, where she jumped John C Reilly’s bones at every opportunity. Or We’re the Millers, in which she played the chirpy matriarch in a motor home who cosies up to Jennifer Aniston and her fake family. Or Wanderlust, again with Aniston, where Hahn played an abrasive hippy. If the cops are telly fans, they might have caught her as the working mother who employs Jessa as a nanny in Girls, or as the fierce, dazzling campaign manager who tells Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation: “You can trust me because I don’t care enough about you to lie.”

Failing all that, it would simply have been a blast to hear Hahn talk her way out of a parking ticket. In a short space of time, she has become one of those performers on whom audiences can depend to produce results out of all proportion to the size of her role. Her latest is as the wife of an unfaithful theatre director (Owen Wilson) in the lightweight farce She’s Funny That Way. It’s her third film with her old chum Aniston (Hahn gave a speech when the Friends actor got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame) and is directed by the Peter Bogdanovich.

“I don’t think Peter likes the kind of improv-heavy, nasty comedy that there is so much of these days – and which I’m personally all for, I gotta tell you. There’s a buoyancy he brings to this movie that is amazing when you step back and look at what it’s about. I mean, my character’s husband has a weakness for prostitutes – come on!”

The best you could say about the film is that it would have been worse in the hands of Woody Allen. But Hahn is magnificent, her performance escalating from casual jauntiness to righteous mania as she confronts the scale of her husband’s infidelities. “I don’t know if you’re with me or not on this,” she says, “but, to me, it’s never that interesting when someone is reaching for the laugh. You have to have it rooted in truth otherwise it’s all just artifice. It doesn’t matter how crazy it gets, it still has to be recognisable.”

In her controlled hysteria there are echoes of the comic legend Madeline Kahn, who played another wronged woman in Bogdanovich’s 1972 screwball masterpiece What’s Up, Doc?. At the comparison, Hahn releases a shriek loud enough to bring those cops scurrying back. “OK, I am gonna hang up now because this day cannot get any better! She was a doll. The idea that I could get anywhere close to that is just … She has inspired everything I’ve done. She is a genius.”

Some of us are starting to feel the same way about Hahn. It isn’t just that she can convey an entire life in one incredulous grimace or narrow-eyed smile. There is also her dexterity. As wild as she got in Step Brothers, flinging herself at the object of her affection in the men’s bathroom before peeing nonchalantly at a urinal, she never let the comedy obscure her character’s desperation (“I hate my life!” she wailed). Her dramatic work is just as impressive: she was Kate Winslet’s neighbour in Revolutionary Road, and gave her most complex performance yet as a married mother drawn to a young female sex-worker in Afternoon Delight (written and directed by Jill Soloway, who also cast Hahn as a troubled rabbi in her Amazon Prime series Transparent).

“I don’t make any distinction between comedy and drama. My favourite summer of all was when I was shooting Revolutionary Road and Step Brothers back to back, or We’re the Millers and Afternoon Delight. I love comedy and feel like I fit into that world, but I also feel like I’m a visitor there sometimes. I never say I’m a natural improviser but, if I have that bulletproof shell of knowing the character inside out, then I can do it. On Step Brothers there were a lot of shitty takes we didn’t use, but it’s all part of the creativity.” One of her favourite films, she says, is John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. “It’s not comic, but there’s a fearlessness about Gena Rowlands that is unhinged. That approach is useful in comedy.”

Hahn has now left behind what she has called the “best-friend chapter” of her career (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, A Lot Like Love). “I think I was the best friend first, then the randy crazy lady [Step Brothers, This Is Where I Leave You]. Now I’m not sure what I am. Afternoon Delight was probably the first time I thought, ‘This is what I wanted someone to ask of me.’” That 2013 film helped awaken the industry to the extent of Hahn’s capabilities. The epiphany might have come even sooner if the US TV version of Absolutely Fabulous, in which she played Eddy opposite her Girls co-star Zosia Mamet as Saffy and Kristen Johnston as Patsy, had been greenlit.

“We did the pilot, but it was the worst timing: right in the middle of the financial crisis. No one wanted to hear about excess. But they were such despicable people that there was something very liberating about doing it. I love the comedy of unearned confidence: people wanting something so badly that they stop themselves getting it. Happiness always just out of reach.”

She addresses a similar subject in her latest TV series, Happyish. The pilot starred the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as a dissatisfied advertising executive; it was retooled several years later for his’s replacement, Steve Coogan. “It’s looking at how to be present and happy in your life,” Hahn explains. “How do you stop searching for happiness when it could be right in front of you? It’s something I’ve come across so many times. It’s about not always reaching for something else. There’s a certain point in your life when you’re like: ‘Oh, wow. Maybe I won’t win the Academy award. Now what?’”

She’s Funny That Way is released in the UK on 26 June.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJ6Zobpwfo9qbGiipaN8coSOpJitoKKuu260wKGlZp%2BZp7m0edGeraikpam2sLrAq7Bmqp%2BWsW6vzqacnbFdmb%2BiucA%3D