On the hottest day of the year so far, Daryl Hannah appears like a mirage outside her Paris hotel. She has been window-shopping and people-watching, but the heat is intense and her foundation is flaking. She explains that she likes taking walks in the city because this was where it all started; it is where her parents met. Without Paris, she says, she would not even exist.
Hannah is in town to plug her role in Sense8, an audacious, globe-hopping Netflix series about fluid identities and the shadowy links between the present and the past. As luck would have it, the first three episodes have her cropping up as a ghost on various bustling city streets. Flaxen hair trails across her shoulders. Her gaze is full of mysterious import. She has something vital to tell us. I have no idea what it is.
Once inside, Hannah retouches her makeup and arranges herself on the couch. At the age of 54, she has amassed more than 70 screen credits and squared all manner of circles. She is the painfully shy child turned 80s poster girl; the Hollywood star who found a fresh lease of life as an environmental campaigner. She has been arrested five times and has seen the inside of jails. But interviews spook her so much that she has a PR sitting with us. She concludes the bulk of her answers with a sheepish giggle, as though taken aback at her own presumption. She looks like a valkyrie and behaves like a faun.
No doubt this friction is part of her appeal. “One of the great advantages with Daryl is that she combines enormous strength with enormous vulnerability,” says Grant Hill, the producer of Sense8. “That’s what makes her so perfect for the role. You have the sense that she is controlling the tension, but that at any moment the balance could shift.”
The trouble is that a discussion of Sense8 can only take us so far. The show is the brainchild of the blockbusting siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski, working alongside Babylon 5 creator J Michael Straczynski, and spotlights the telepathic communication between eight strangers in eight different cities. But the series is designed to reveal its hand slowly and the opening episodes scatter so many clues that it is all I can do to work out whether we are in Berlin or Nairobi. Hannah takes pity. She insists the show is beautiful and profound and that everything of importance will be explained in due course. “I believe that when you see the whole series it will expand your mind,” she says. She peers at me earnestly. “And your heart.”
Assuming Sense8 connects, it will count as a comeback of sorts. Her recent credits are dotted with obscure titles such as SOS: Love! and Zombie Night. I have the sense that acting has been playing second fiddle to her real-world concerns. Hannah edits and presents her own environmental blog on sustainable living (DHlovelife), although she laments that the site is in need of updating. Over the past decade, she has helped to organise protests against the closure of a community farm in Los Angeles, surface mining in West Virginia and the construction of the Keystone oil pipeline between Canada and the Gulf coast. Her Hollywood profile lends visibility to causes that otherwise risk being ignored by the mainstream news media. It must also make it awkward for the cops sent to put her in handcuffs.
She nods. “Oh yeah, it’s pretty funny. Generally I end up taking pictures with the sheriffs at the station. So I do get singled out – not necessarily in good ways. The times I’ve been put in jail, I’m always in solitary. Partly because they think: ‘Oh, she must be the ringleader.’ Partly to protect me from the drunks and murderers.” She laughs at the memory. “It’s kind of scary and boring being in solitary.”
Naturally, she makes an effort to lead by example. Her house runs on solar power; her car on recycled grease from fast food. But she acknowledges that the wider struggle verges on the Sisyphean.
Does she feel hopeful? She see-saws her hand. “I go back and forth. Sometimes I’m very optimistic, when I’ve just participated in some action with young people and can see that there is a growing awareness. But then when you see the brick wall of resistance within the legislative and political system, it can be very frustrating.”
She was raised in a world of wealth and privilege, of private jets and holiday homes. But her adolescence was a torment and she was bullied by her peers. A doctor diagnosed her as “borderline autistic” and suggested she be hospitalised. Acting, she says, was her way of escaping into a fantasy world. By the time she turned 25, Hannah had played the punkish replicant Pris in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the Cro-Magnon orphan in The Clan of the Cave Bear, and Tom Hanks’s wide-eyed mermaid lover in the box-office hit Splash. She felt that her salvation had been there all along.
“Oh, for sure, when I did Blade Runner, I was completely transported to another world. The whole thing was perfect. It was just what I wanted. I wanted to become another person. I wanted to live in another reality.”
The illusion, however, could not last for ever. “I always loved the process, but I was very uncomfortable with the other aspects of the job – the publicity and all that stuff. And I didn’t anticipate that, because I was such a fan of 30s and 40s cinema: I thought it would all be so glamorous. ‘Oh, I’ll be getting out of a car and walking into Grauman’s Chinese theatre, won’t that be so wonderful?’ I didn’t realise that, because I was a self-conscious, picked-on kid, when people were looking at me, I’d feel they were making fun of me.”
Even when those people were applauding and cheering? “Well, yeah,” she splutters. “Because that was the only attention I was used to. So the attention triggered the same old response. I knew that people were looking at me because I looked weird.”
It seems safe to assume that the world did not think she looked weird. She was tall, blond and beautiful; the possessor of “one of the 10 best female bodies”, according to McCall’s magazine. Producers fell over themselves to cast her as an object of desire. Off screen, she has had relationships with David Blaine and John F Kennedy Jr; Jackson Browne and Neil Young. But I keep recalling what Hill told me about her curious blend of vulnerability and strength. It occurs to me that many of those early roles installed Hannah as a particularly benighted male fantasy figure: the gauche, innocent child with the body of a woman.
“Oh no,” she protests. “Not always. Come on.” She mentions 1989’s Steel Magnolias, in which she played a frowsy southern misfit behind thick, horn-rimmed specs. “But, actually, I did a lot of films where I wasn’t playing that role. And, come on – every 20-year-old actress is installed in that way. It’s a male-dominated industry. It’s just a bunch of guys saying: ‘Let’s make the girl younger, and sexy, and hot.’ So, yeah, of course it’s exploitative. And that’s unfortunate because it has the potential to be really transformative in expressing the human condition.”
In hindsight, she sees that her first 12 months in the business were pure playtime, in that she was able to shoot a bunch of movies unnoticed before the klieg light was switched on. After that, she was stricken. Journalists kept asking about her acting technique, when of course she had no technique; she was making it up as she went along. So, she enrolled in acting classes and immersed herself in Shakespeare and reckons that this was a disaster; it messed her up more than ever. It took her years to reconnect with the skills she had to begin with. “All I was trying to do was to lose myself in the fantasy, just like a kid does in the playground. People kept telling me that it wasn’t enough, to the point where I didn’t know that pretending something and believing it is all that it is. Seriously,” she laughs, “that’s all acting is.”
As a kid, she loved Judy Garland and longed to be whisked away to the land of Oz. Now she accepts Oz isn’t real and has made her peace with the pretence. The day after our interview, she is going to the south of France, where her elderly mother is having a birthday party. A storybook child might travel there by tornado. A Hollywood star would fly down on a jet. But Hannah prides herself on finding more sensible solutions – a sustainable middle route between these two fantasy worlds. Her ticket is prebooked; she is taking the train.
• Sense8 is available on Netflix now.
