Although John-Kamen feels she didn’t have “bad memories of being held back” by others or “any racism,” she does recall holding herself back in the quest to “fit in,” and she says that microaggressions—a term that wasn’t commonly used at the time—were commonplace. “I could see that I was the only different-looking person [on the playground], and I didn’t want everyone else to see that. It was like it’s my secret that I’m not going to tell, and [I thought], ‘I hope they don’t find out that I’m actually mixed race.’ It’s a very bizarre way of thinking, but that’s what I felt,” she says. I then ask her about the microaggressions she had to fight against. “It was stuff like going into a shop and being told, ‘The sales section is over there,’ but they don’t tell the white person about the sales,” she replies. “Or someone saying, ‘I’m not racist. I have a Black friend.’ I’ve had it before where someone goes, ‘Oh my God, can I touch your hair? Is your hair real?’ I get a lot [of] ‘Are your eyes real?’ When you go out to a party, you go out for dinner, you get commented on, and it’s a bit of a Josephine Baker moment where you go, ‘Why are you looking, staring, pointing and prodding me like that because I’m not doing it to you? No one else is doing that to anyone white in this room.’”
With her age, experience and high profile, I wonder whether she feels more empowered to call people out now. “Absolutely,” she says instantly. “I feel like it’s my duty. I will never stand by and let that happen and for people who aren’t there yet who don’t feel like they can.” The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last year also inspired John-Kamen: “We were all forced to lock the f**k down, shut up and listen.”
There’s also something about hitting your 30s that encourages growth and reflection, and John-Kamen isn’t immune to that. “I actually look back at my life and in certain moments of it and go, ‘Wow, Hannah, how did you get yourself out of that?’ I remember there was one [time] where I was working, working, working in my early 20s, and then I didn’t work for a really long time. In my head, I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m failing.’ But actually, no, I wasn’t,” she says. “I worked in a bar for a bit and was just a young girl in the big city—just living, surviving, making the wrong decisions and falling in love with the wrong people, which we have to do! It’s a rightful passage of life! I lived in an apartment the size of this table in Archway.” She gestures over the marble table towards a location that may only be a 15-minute car journey away but is now worlds apart from this memory. “It was above a kebab shop. The guys downstairs looked after me. I used their internet. They let me have free food because I was so skint, and I didn’t want to tell my parents. I was so happy because the pressure of being a successful movie star wasn’t in my head. I had the biggest parties as well with all these boys in my tiny, little room,” she adds, flexing the archetypal ambitious grit of a Virgo.
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