Olivia Colman: “I’ve Always Described Myself to My Husband as a Gay Man”

Sophie Hyde’s latest movie, Jimpa, began as a sort of wish fulfillment. Based on her life experiences, the film — opening this week in limited release — tells the story of Hannah (Olivia Colman), mother to nonbinary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde, Sophie’s real-life child), as she and Frances journey to Amsterdam to visit Frances’s grandpa Jim (John Lithgow, also set to play Dumbledore in the upcoming Harry Potter series). During the visit, Frances confesses that they want to stay in Amsterdam with “Jimpa,” prompting Hannah to re-evaluate her relationship with both her queer child and her queer parent.

Drawn from her own life, Hyde crafted Jimpa out of a desire to see her own child, Mason-Hyde, and her gay father be able to communicate about tough questions regarding sexuality and gender. This hard but necessary intergenerational dialogue is on full display in Jimpa, which features a number of conversations between Jim, an HIV-positive man who only survived thanks to the community activism amid the AIDS crisis, and Frances, whose nonbinary identity sometimes flummoxes and confounds their grandfather.

While some of the conversations in Jimpa can be tense and wince-inducing, the film depicts a nontraditional family looking to make room for all kinds. “That was the impulse to make the film, to put them in a room together, and then it kind of grew into this big family drama,” Hyde tells Them.

Meanwhile, the film’s themes also resonated with its star, Colman, who tells Them that she has never felt comfortable with rigid gender roles, including in her own marriage. “I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female,” she says. “I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man.”

In a Zoom interview with Them, Hyde and Colman spoke about capturing the legacy of the AIDS crisis onscreen, Colman’s love for queer storytelling, and why Hyde wanted to give the film a distinctly intracommunity feel.

Sophie, I know that Jimpa is very much based on your own life experience. When did you start to approach the material of your own life as the subject of a film?

Sophie Hyde: Two-pronged answer. My dad died in 2018, and he was like Jim in the film; a very eccentric, very provocative man, openly gay, an AIDS activist and health worker, and very publicly queer. I always knew him as someone who kind of put his body on the line and didn’t have much choice about whether he was political, but kind of went with it.

When he died, my child, who’s a trans nonbinary queer person, was really starting to come out and speak about their own queer identity. They were doing that quite publicly too. And I wish that they could sit down together and talk about it and talk about the hard stuff of that — how volatile it is and how much attacked you might be — but also the really great bits that you discover when you have that kind of reckoning with yourself and the world.

I just thought it would be great for them to do that. That was the impulse to make the film, to put them in a room together, and then it kind of grew into this big family drama.

The film really does give us a glimpse into intergenerational conversations within the LGBTQ+ community. You were just kind of saying that these characters were a wish fulfillment for you. How did you want to portray all these intracommunity nuances?

SH: We did want it to be intracommunity. We really wanted to have a nuanced conversation. And we thought it was a time where we would be able to do that. We didn’t know that we were going to have to speak sort of publicly and broadly and defend those positions so much. We wanted to be able to be like, “How do we argue with each other?” “How do we disagree on these things?” “How do we speak?”

I had a feeling that sometimes there are young queer people who have been able to find each other online [but] haven’t always had elders to be with. In my own life, I always had this older generation of queer people who I knew, so I felt that I was really lucky. But I didn’t think we were listening much to the kind of learnings of the AIDS crisis and the health response that happened.

And I certainly didn’t think the older generation was listening much to people who were going, “Hey, we’re going to try and name and be really clear with things and open and liberate all of us a bit more.” So it was like, “How do we be together and disagree with each other?”

Olivia, your character, Hannah, is very much part of the queer community because of her family, but she’s also on the outskirts. I’m wondering if that outsider position played a role in how you built Hannah.

Olivia Colman: I don’t know, because I suppose I am on the outside. I have a heterosexual relationship. But in the world I live in, I’m with queer community a lot. So I suppose there’s similarities there, although I have less of an insight than Hannah, because Hannah grew up with it.

And I had Sophie and Aud [Mason-Hyde] to always ask. Most of the actors were from, particularly in the Dutch side of things, from the queer community there; I’ve never been part of a more welcoming group of people. For all those naysayers or haters or meanies, if [only] they could spend the time with the most welcoming, kind bunch of people. I kind of want everyone to just come and say hi and actually feel total love. I sort of forgot what you asked. [Laughs]

I think Hannah is on the outskirts a little bit, and I think that’s an interesting place to build a character from, so I just wanted to know if that informed your building of her.

OC: Well, I wasn’t too far off. I think it’s important as an outsider to look and listen. We could all learn a lot from that. And Hannah was really good at that. I think it helped that I’m fairly close to Sophie in my views and attitudes, so it wasn’t too much of a leap for me to play Hannah.

But I do think I learned an awful lot on the way as well. Actually, I’m not sure that I spent so much time with anyone in the trans community before then, thinking about it, you know. Yeah, I did learn a bit, and I got better at pronouns as well.

Olivia, you have Jimpa, The Favourite, Heartstopper, Beautiful People. You have a career that has always featured stories that include the queer community. What do you think it is about stories that include queer people that excites you as a storyteller and actor?

OC: I think it’s a community that I love being welcomed into. I find the most loving and the most beautiful stories are from that community. And I feel really honored to be welcomed.

Throughout my whole life, I’ve had arguments with people where I’ve always felt sort of nonbinary. Don’t make that a big sort of title! But I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man. And he goes, “Yeah, I get that.”

So I do feel at home and at ease. I feel like I have a foot in various camps. I know many people who do. I don’t really spend an awful lot of time with people who are very staunchly heterosexual…. The men I know and love are very in touch with all sides of themselves.

SH: What you’re talking about is so familiar. We can have different positions and stuff, but because we’re raised as women, we’re socialized as women, but that doesn’t mean that’s not a limiting idea for us — the idea of being a woman or womanhood. It doesn’t necessarily fit for all of us. I think these binaries of gender are problematic for many of us. It’s like, how can you fit? There are problems sometimes. A lot of us have been limited by this.

OC: And men are limited, too, in that — in the expectation they have to live up to. I think with my husband and I, we take turns to be the “strong one,” or the one who needs a little bit of gentleness. I believe everyone has all of it in them. I’ve always felt like that. It’s only now, and talking to Aud and their community, suddenly I’m not an oddity.

I’m not alone in saying, “I don’t feel like it’s binary.” And I loved that. I came away from making this film with, Yeah, I knew I wasn’t alone. I think I choose all these films because they’re films that speak to me. I want to help in telling those stories.

“I think it’s a community that I love being welcomed into. I find the most loving and the most beautiful stories are from that community. And I feel really honored to be welcomed.”

Sophie, my father was also HIV-positive, and he passed away in 2011. That story resonated a lot with me. It’s not one that you often see on film. What did it mean for you to kind of marry your very personal history with HIV and also a very public and political AIDS history in the film?

SH: Thank you for saying that. I haven’t heard that very often from people.

My dad became HIV-positive when I was a teenager, and I actually thought he was just going to die. I was like, “Oh, he’s going to die and I will have to nurse him.” That was when everyone was dying. It was the early ’90s and lots of people we knew were dying, and then the drugs came in and people started to survive.

Honestly, I never thought he would be around to meet a child that I had. And then Aud was born, and there was my dad. I was like, “Fuck, okay, you’re here!” And he had that experience of getting older, and no one expected to get older. It was really important to me.

The AIDS crisis was such a huge moment in my life and in [the lives of] so many people I know. We lost so many people, and it’s talked about so little. I just can’t believe it. We’ve learned so little about it. When we had this huge COVID pandemic, I just remember thinking, What the fuck? These guys worked out how to have community care across health organizations, and we’re not even turning to them, because everyone relegated it to drug users and gay men as though they were not to be listened to.

That history of having to fight for something and losing a lot has informed a whole lot of people, and informed how they think. The things that they fought really hard for are being threatened now. So those elements were important.

Olivia, you’re in Jimpa now, and I read that you are coming out with another film, about the actor Ian Charleston, called Elsinore. Both films touch on the AIDS crisis. What is your relationship to the epidemic? Why you were drawn to these two films that are different takes on it?

OC: Daniel Day-Lewis was playing Hamlet and saw an actual ghost of his father and had a bit of a breakdown. Ian Charleston, the man who took over [the part], had been told he had AIDS. This was in ’89. He wanted to play Hamlet, and life was about quality, not quantity to him. He was accepted into an incredible medical program and had really good results. And he said, “But I must play Hamlet.” I play his doctor, who’s a real woman. Andrew Scott plays Ian Charleston. He’s a friend of mine, so he said, “Will you do it?” And I go, “Absolutely. How lovely.” I get to share the screen with Andrew Scott — it’s like a dream.

I remember the ’80s. I remember adverts on the telly about AIDS. And, in the UK anyway, AIDS was on a big tombstone [in a PSA]. I remember as a kid going, “How do you get it? Is it from holding hands? Is it from kissing?” We didn’t know. All of this ignorance was attached to it. I remember the prejudice attached at the time. I think it’s important to tell these stories and important to remember what it was like.