The reason why Daryl Hannah abandoned Hollywood
The reason Daryl Hannah left Hollywood: “I experienced instant repercussions”
If you’re a fan of movies from the 1980s and ‘90s, chances are Daryl Hannah needs no introduction. Shortly after playing a runaway replicant in Ridley Scott’s flop-turned-sci-fi classic Blade Runner, she landed her breakthrough role as a mermaid in Ron Howard’s 1984 romantic comedy Splash opposite Tom Hanks. From there, she starred in dozens of popular releases, including the romance Roxanne and the dramas Wall Street and Steel Magnolias.
In the early 2000s, Hannah landed the most iconic role of her career, playing assassin Elle Driver in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2. As the decade wore on, however, she starred in fewer and fewer films, and those she did appear in were nowhere near the calibre of her previous work. This could easily be chalked up to the maddening sidelining of women over 40 in Hollywood, but in Hannah’s case, it was much more complicated.
For one thing, she never enjoyed being in the public eye. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, the actor talked about how quickly her she fell out of love with the business. “When I did Blade Runner, I was completely transported to another world,” she said. “The whole thing was perfect. It was just what I wanted.”
Soon, however, the realities of being famous set in. “I was very uncomfortable with the other aspects of the job – the publicity and all that stuff,” she said.
In 2013, Hannah also revealed that she was diagnosed with autism as a child and that her “debilitating shyness” had made public appearances, such as interviews and talk shows, excruciating. Acting was a blissful experience, but being a star was terrifying.
The main reason that her career seemed to come to such a swift halt shortly after Kill Bill, however, was Harvey Weinstein. Hannah was one of the many women who came forward during the MeToo movement to recount harrowing stories of the producer’s sexual predation. In 2017, she told the New Yorker that during the Cannes Film Festival one year, Weinstein pounded on her hotel room door so aggressively that she escaped through a back entrance and spent the night with her makeup artist. The following night, Weinstein returned, and she barricaded herself in the room.
A few years later, around the premiere of Kill Bill: Volume 2, Hannah was in her hotel room with a male makeup artist when Weinstein used a key to get inside. He stopped short when he saw that there was a man in the room. Later, he asked to touch her breasts. She told him in no uncertain terms to “Fuck off” and quickly discovered that he didn’t take that sort of rejection lightly.
“I experienced instant repercussions,” she said. By ‘instant’, she meant that her plane tickets home the next day were cancelled, as was her trip to the Cannes premiere of the film. She told her colleagues about what had happened, but it made no difference. “I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed,” she said. “We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticised and blamed.”
Hannah moved away from acting and into environmental activism and directing after leaving Hollywood. When she presented the award for ‘Best Editing’ at the 97th Academy Awards earlier this year, she was one of the few people at the ceremony who made an allusion to politics, beginning her speech with “Slava Ukraine}”.
