Hannah Dunne follows in her father Griffin Dunne’s actorly footsteps while charting her own path as Lizzie on Amazon’s “Mozart in the Jungle” and as Emma in a recent Off-Broadway run of the teary “Terms of Endearment,” her New York theater debut.
On clicking with Lizzie on ‘Mozart.’
“In the beginning, I think she was young and a bit of a dummy, honestly. But I think we can all relate to that. More than anything, she was fun to play. I enjoy playing someone I don’t always agree with. She’s great, but she’s a little difficult. She gives people a lot of shit.”
READ: “6 Questions With...Griffin Dunne”
On her post-Trump ‘Terms of Endearment.’
“After the night that Trump won, we had rehearsal the next day and we were just like, ‘How do we get back into this?’ But it’s made me realize that these are two really strong female characters. There’s a line toward the end of the play where Emma says to her daughter, ‘Don’t you ever think that all you are is what some boy thinks of you.’ Just saying it since all this has happened really resonated even more with me. Now, even more, it’s like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ ”
On memorizing her lines.
“One thing that I always try to do is to write my lines down. When I see it through my handwriting, it tells me new things and helps me find the voice. It also doesn’t get it to where I start to memorize it in a melodic way, where I accidentally get in a rhythm and say everything the same way.”
On her love of theater.
“I like theater a lot because it’s free-flowing. One moment to the next [it] just kind of keeps on going. We did one episode that [co-creator] Roman [Coppola] directed on ‘Mozart,’ and it was these long shots of just following one storyline and then the other characters walk in. And it really made me realize how much I would like to do theater again. ‘Horace and Pete’ was really like that. We just did, like, three takes and it was like a play—20 minutes each, three cameras. It’s just different. I like that free-flowing, going from one moment to the next, no cuts.”
READ: “Backstage Experts Answer: 18 Ways to Quickly Memorize Lines”
On acting alongside her best friend.
“Lola Kirke is my oldest friend in the world in real life. I got cast [on ‘Mozart in the Jungle’] and I was like, ‘Who else is in it?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God—no! That’s amazing!’ It just feels really crazy and surreal because we’ve always wanted to be actresses since we were little girls, so for my first big project where I’m not a day player, to have it be with my best and oldest friend was really amazing and bizarre.”
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