How Hannah Pilkes brought a dash of queerness to new sitcom Leanne: ‘Hopefully it moves the needle a bit’

Behind the scenes of new Netflix sitcom Leanne, comedian and actress Hannah Pilkes would have her make-up touched up by the woman who inspired the character she plays.

It’s not quite as meta as it sounds. Pilkes plays Josie in Leanne, which is co-created by and stars fellow comedian and actress Leanne Morgan. It’s a warm comedy based on Morgan’s stand-up show I’m Every Woman, with semi-autobiographical elements. Josie is moulded on Morgan’s daughter Tess, Pilkes says, who is the show’s hair and make-up artist. “I was like, ‘How do I play this daughter? I’m like, let me just watch Tess. She’s so whip-smart funny,” Pilkes says jauntily, bright-eyed and just happy to be here.

Also co-created by TV titan Chuck Lorre (The Big Bang Theory; Two and a Half Men; Mike & Molly), Leanne is irrefutably Pilkes’ biggest gig yet in terms of potential eyes on it. A cast of Hollywood funnywomen lead it including, alongside Morgan, 3rd Rock from the Sun star Kristen Johnston – “Who I’ve grown up watching” – as Leanne’s sister Carol, and Modern Family’s Celia Weston as her mother (or Mama) Margaret.

Lorre’s fingerprints, prickly with his Midas touch, are all over it: a big family (this one in the deep south, in Knoxville, Tennessee) who are close in proximity, yet chasms apart in personality, get caught up in endless cross-generational capers from the comfort of their kitchen. Leanne is newly single, as her husband has left after 33 years of marriage; cue plenty of sex and dating jibes. Canned laughter abounds. There’s even a Lorre staple in a character who drinks too much: in walks Josie.

“Oh no,” says Johnston’s Carol when Josie enters her first scene, in a church. “Just remember, your son turned out good.” She’s ditzy and woozy, having just spent all night presumably partying at an unknown location (“I think it was a blue house?”), and has somehow lost her car in the process.

“Josie’s a free spirit but she’s also like so many of us are [in our] late twenties going into thirties, just a little lost as to the implications of that age. It feels so weighty,” Pilkes reasons, throwing her hands about the screen of our Zoom call.

At 32, is she at all like Josie? “In my late 20s – which I’m twenty-smnmnm now, an undisclosed young age – I’m a free spirit, I’ll say,” she teases puckishly. “Me and my sister, growing up, she was very much the good grades, the home on time [person] and I snuck out in high school. I found a way to sneak out of my room and I definitely got into trouble….” Things are a little different now for the queer star, who married her partner, non-binary performance artist Greg Nussen, almost three years ago. “The irony is now I love being home.”

Pilkes grew up in New York City on a diet of the Golden Age of sitcoms, which Lorre spearheaded. Will & Grace, Just Shoot Me and the perennial Friends were favourites, plus Lorre’s own 1997 creation Dharma & Greg. “I just think he’s such an amazing storyteller,” she raves.

Pilkes entered the acting business aged 11 bagging an “intense” role alongside Kevin Bacon. It was in 2004 child abuse drama The Woodsman, and inexplicably, it was her first ever audition. “I just went to an open call and happened to get a movie, which is unheard of and was not the case after that,” she laughs. The interest in comedy, for which Pilkes has become predominately known for, arrived during her teen years. 

She trained at the Los Angeles branch of Second City, the comedy sanctum where the likes of Joan Rivers, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Steve Carell cut their teeth. She then hit the road supporting Meg Stalter and Caitlin Reilly. Performances on comedy streaming service Dropout TV and award-winning podcast Comedy Bang! Bang! followed, while Pilkes slowly built an online following. Her brand of comedy was the specific type you watched blow up on TikTok during the pandemic, which likely helped matters.

“I love what I do, which I would say is a crossover between stand-up storytelling and character. It’s like, I got a lot of wigs in my bag,” she laughs, sweeping (real) blonde hair behind her ears. On Instagram, you’ll find her pretending to be an “angry Christmas woman with too many keys”, or a “therapist who can’t stop watching herself on Zoom”.

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Indeed, her social sketches were one of the reasons she got hired for Leanne in the first place. But crossing the bridge between the two was no easy feat.

“It was so wild to go back to what feels like the roots of comedy in a lot of ways, the sitcom,” she says. What did she learn from being in Lorre’s comedy empire? “Be malleable and stay calm. Take a beta blocker if you need to. I learned that I need a beta blocker some days,” she giggles, maybe joking, maybe not.

Ostensibly, Leanne is as gruellingly heterosexual as sitcoms come (“It’s very nebulous with Josie, who knows for Josie’s future,” Pilkes counters). Yet there’s something quietly powerful about the fact that, while the Trump administration tries to suppress queerness in all its facets, here is a queer woman stealing scenes and pulling focus, unbeknownst to its largely heterosexual audience. 

“We need levity right now, and we also need representation of the people that feel under fire right now. I mean, [that’s] your pick of anybody,” she says, stern now but still wonderfully animated. “I’m aware of my fortune in this and that I don’t feel like I’m in direct risk of a lot of things right now. So, I feel really grateful to get to be in a position where it’s like, ‘Yes, I am a proud queer person on this show.’ And hopefully even just that gets to help, you know, move the needle a bit.”

Growing up, Pilkes’ mother would take her to watch queer spoken word artists at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe, while at age five, her Dutch father took her to the Canal Parade parade in Amsterdam, part of the city’s Pride celebrations. “I grew up in a household that was incredibly supportive, so my queerness was never a question to me. From very young, I actually didn’t even understand the binaries because that’s not what was introduced to me. It was sort of like, ‘You love who you love.’”

That celebration of inclusivity has followed her through life; she frequently uses her social platforms to speak out about trans rights, and shares the journey that she and Nussen have been on. “I’ve been with my partner for seven years and we’re constantly evolving,” she says. “They came out as non-binary last year and I think if you create safe spaces then people can actualise and realise parts of themselves they might not know.”

Pilkes recently directed Nussen in their show QFWFQ, adding another string to her bow. “I think I want to continue to do everything,” she says, with the list including directing, acting, writing, online comedy, offline comedy, movie-making. Now, it seems achievable, and worlds away from where she found herself in 2013, working a catering job on the Warner Bros’ film lot. “12 years later, I got to bring my parents to my Leanne premiere on that very same lot,” she shared in a recent Instagram post.

“The magic of a show like Leanne getting made is it’s her story,” Pilkes beams, awed. “Someone sought out, said ‘I love the way that you tell a story, the way that you captivate us is what we want to platform’. So I want the same. I want to continue to take my individual experience and fuse that into my own art and try to seek out stories that have a really unique point of view and celebrate those.”

Leanne is streaming on Netflix now.

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