Olivia Colman has built a career out of stepping into complicated lives, but her latest role hits especially close to home.
In Jimpa, directed by Sophie Hyde, Colman plays Hannah, a mother navigating tense and tender conversations between her nonbinary child and her openly gay father. The film follows three generations in Amsterdam as old-school queer activism meets a younger generation’s language around gender identity.
While promoting the film, Colman spoke candidly about her own relationship to gender and why the story resonated with her beyond the script.
“I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female,” Colman said to Them in a new interview. “I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man.”
According to Colman, that shorthand has long helped her explain how she sees herself.
Her husband’s response? “Yeah, I get that,” she shared, adding that the dynamic in their marriage doesn’t hinge on traditional expectations. “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.”
Colman stopped short of attaching labels to herself, but she acknowledged feeling outside rigid definitions. “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!” she said, laughing. “I’ve always felt like that.”
Working on Jimpa further expanded that understanding. Colman noted that being around director Hyde and Hyde’s child, Aud Mason-Hyde, who is trans and nonbinary, shifted her perspective.
“It’s only now, and talking to Aud and their community, suddenly I’m not an oddity,” she said. “I’m not alone in saying, ‘I don’t feel like it’s binary.’ And I loved that.”
Although Colman is in a heterosexual marriage, she described herself as someone who has long felt at ease within queer spaces. “I think it’s a community that I love being welcomed into,” she said. “I find the most loving and the most beautiful stories are from that community. And I feel really honored to be welcomed.”
For Colman, those stories aren’t just compelling on screen—they reflect how she moves through the world. “I feel like I have a foot in various camps,” she explained, adding that the men in her life are “very in touch with all sides of themselves.”
