Hannah Gadsby has opened up about Nanette, male violence and her future as a comedian in a frank conversation with Peter Helliar on The Project.

Gadsby is currently grappling with her newfound global fame following the release of her critically acclaimed Netflix special. “It’s gone a little silly,” she admitted. “Especially in the US… I’d never even tried to crack that market.”

“I’m getting all sorts of messages from India,” she added. “I’m big in India!”

“I Was Going Through Grief”

While Nanette has been praised for the way it combines humour with devastating personal stories, Gadsby told Helliar that it took her a while to get the balance right.

“I was going through grief, I think” she said. “It wasn’t a performance, it was lived. I could feel it in my body, and I felt hurt, I felt pain, I felt the grief of… a wasted life, a little bit.”

“I felt grief for little Hannah, like why wasn’t anyone looking after me?”

Asked if her mother had seen the show, Gadsby said she initially performed a “modified version” for her parents when they came to see it in Hobart.

“They don’t need to experience in a room full of strangers that level of vulnerability,” she said. “There’s a certain amount of guilt, shame … I didn’t want to put them through that.”

But Gadsby also revealed that her mother came to see the performance that was recorded for Netflix at the Sydney Opera House — a performance she was not able to tone down.

“What it meant for me is that both the stakes for my career, and also personal stakes, were sky high at the same time,” said Gadsby. “That made it hard to perform.”

“Women Are Hitting A Point Of Exhaustion”

One of the recurring themes of Nanette is the effect that male aggression has on women.

“I think we’re seeing women hitting a point of exhaustion going ‘why do we have to always be careful about where we are’,” Gadsby told Helliar. “Men can’t handle their alcohol, men can’t handle their emotions, men are very moody.

“Women for centuries have been levelled with ‘oh, you’re hormonal, are you on your rags?’ What do you call it when men snap? What do you call it when men forget not to rape? What do you call those things? That is being hormonal and unable to regulate your emotions. And that is not a conversation anybody is having.”

“They’re not bad guys, they’re men who cannot control their emotions,” Gadsby continued. “They cannot handle their families leaving them. And that it cultural as much as it is individual, and we need to do a lot of work to undo that. But at the moment, often all it is is ‘well what was she doing?’ That is essentially what victim blaming is.”

“Boys will be boys, so women must be careful. Can we get men to be men?”

If you have never watched any @Hannahgadsby or her @NetflixANZ special #Nanette

She’s on the #TheProjectTV and I love her so much.
Perhaps, currently, one of the most important people speaking out in Australia.

Please, please, watch it. Laugh and cry and be a better person

— Little Stranger (@indigohan) July 17, 2018

“I Have To Be A Hypocrite Or An Idiot”

Another huge part of Nanette is that Gadsby uses the show to announce that she’s going to quit comedy — although it sounds like she’s having second thoughts in light of the show’s enormous success.

“So you’ve quit comedy, but in doing so you’ve become the hottest thing in comedy,” joked Helliar. “That’s a sticky situation.”

“I’m either going to have to be a hypocrite or an idiot,” conceded Gadsby. “Well I’m an idiot, that’s well established. So I might give hypocrite a go and keep doing comedy. Of sorts.

“I think whatever I do will involve storytelling and humour, but what that is remains to be seen.”

You can watch Gadsby’s full interview on The Project below.