7/17/2023 0 Comments Dice club netflixThey thought it would be disingenuous to continue down a certain path just because it had shown them success. “Where I was in my life, there was genuine anger there, and that all came out.” But Gadsby’s on the other side of trauma now. “The point of Nanette was to break out of the harm that being locked into a certain way of communicating can do to a person,” Gadsby explains to me. Nanette was supposed to be their swan song, a strongly worded fuck you to comedy’s boys' club and a demeaning system that froze Gadsby in one of the most traumatic points in their life. But the self-deprecating stories they told about queerness and coming out took a major toll on the comedian, so much so that Gadsby intended to use their Netflix debut as a way to announce their retirement. They won the competition and eventually found enough success in the ensuing decade to sustain a career as a touring comedian. They studied art history and spent their twenties bouncing between jobs, before deciding to enter a comedy competition in Melbourne-despite having never been onstage. Hannah Gadsby grew up the youngest of five children in Smithton, Tasmania. Something Special isn’t just a feel-good show-it’s a romcom about Gadsby’s relationship to their new wife, Jenney Shamash. Now I’m part of the problem!” But from where I sit on the other side of the world, staring at Gadsby hunched forward in a tall, crimson reading chair positioned in the corner of a dimly lit living room, what I see is a world-weary comedian who will never stop punching up. In our current global clusterfuck, what's more alienating and unrelatable than having things go pretty great for you? As Gadsby anxiously explains: “I hit safety, and the world fell apart. Still, how do you stay in the fight, remain a voice for the marginalized, when you yourself are no longer suffering? The question looms over Gadsby as they gear up to release their third Netflix special-a feel-good show titled Something Special, streaming on May 9. The way Gadsby sees it, they have two options: fight like hell against fame’s insistent tug toward out-of-touch aloofness or go “the Gwyneth Paltrow road.” Embrace delusion and say things like, “It's actually really hard having four skiing instructors,” Gadsby deadpans, before clarifying, “I don’t think she’s lying!”Īs much as Gadsby thinks their slow transformation into Gwyneth Paltrow would make for “interesting performance art,” they concede it’s unlikely to happen. The realization has put them in an existential tailspin. They just go, ‘You eat now.’” At the same time, Gadsby recognizes that they now have the kind of privilege that affords such cluelessness. “You don't do anything for yourself on set,” Gadsby tells me. “It does things to people’s brains,” Gadsby says, recalling a time on set when “some rich white lady said, ‘It’s really hard being a mother and an actress.’” The comment struck Gadsby as clueless. Gadsby worries that fame will turn them into a “bad apple.” They look bewildered, like a dog in space, as they try to square the person they were before Nanette with the star they have since become. “I genuinely don’t understand this world,” Gadsby, 45, tells me over a recent evening Zoom call from their home in Melbourne. The comedian’s paradigm-shifting Netflix special, Nanette, went viral in 2018, rocketing Gadsby into an orbit of celebrity that, to this day, they cannot process. Hannah Gadsby wasn’t gunning for fame, but it came for them anyway.
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