In HBO Max’s new series Hacks, Hannah Einbinder’s character Ava is introduced at a rock-bottom moment in her nascent comedy career. Sitting inside her manager’s office after a flippant tweet rendered her canceled on social media and unhirable in Hollywood, Ava considers jumping out the window.
The manager, played by series cocreator Paul W. Downs, objects.
“You’d probably just break your legs because of the fifth-floor terrace,” he says coolly. “But if you’re serious…”
“I’m not,” she assures the manager. If she were, she reminds him, “I told you how I’d kill myself a million times: I’d wear a suicide vest on Watch What Happens Live.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair in May, Einbinder said, “When I read her joke about killing herself on live television, I was like, Okay, sister. I feel that.”
A 26-year-old stand-up comedian who happens to be the daughter of founding Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman and comedy writer Chad Einbinder, she spent the last few years auditioning for the occasional onscreen part—like “the shy bookworm” or “the super quirky, happy, fun, upbeat girl.” Neither persona felt as natural a fit as Ava, which marks Einbinder’s first major acting role.
“It’s the first time I’ve auditioned for someone and it was like, Yeah, this girl is a friend of mine,” said Einbinder.
Hacks begins with Jean Smart’s character, an established comedy headliner named Deborah Vance, being forced to hire a young joke writer (enter Ava) to freshen up her long-running Vegas act. The relationship between Deborah and Ava is icy at first—Deborah doesn’t see why she needs to hire some bratty millennial, and Ava has no interest working with a woman she views as washed-up. Offscreen, though, Smart was warm and welcoming to her Hacks protégé, even before Einbinder got the part.
“The night before [the audition], she called me at like 10:45,” said Einbinder. “She’s really such a chill woman. She said, ‘I watched your stand-up and I think you’re really great. I know tomorrow, with COVID precautions, it may feel weird, but I wanted to let you know I think we’re going to have a lot of fun.’”
Up until that point, Einbinder was used to performing solo. Right before the shutdown last year, Einbinder became the youngest stand-up, at 23, to perform a set on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert—establishing herself as a fresh and fierce talent to follow. Then the pandemic lockdown halted any momentum in Einbinder’s fledgling career, and her ability to further hone her act in nightclubs.
The Hacks script was instantly appealing. But the idea of acting was daunting, especially when coupled with the fact that the two-hander series would need Einbinder to hold her own with Smart—“a legend,” in Einbinder’s words, and accomplished two-time Emmy winner (Frasier, Samantha Who?) whose career spans back to the ’80s sitcom Designing Women.
At the audition, Einbinder and Smart role-played their characters’ combative first meeting, which takes place at Deborah’s sprawling Las Vegas mansion. The scene is a doozy dialogue-wise, with initial pleasantries quickly turning into a rat-a-tat insult fest.
“We did the first run together, and she and I shared a look that we would go on to share many times throughout the production after a good moment,” said Einbinder, marveling at the instant connection. “It really just came so naturally, even in a very dark soundstage with a couple of spotlights on us. I could see her very subtle smile, and it told me everything I needed to know, and gave me the sense of relief that carried me through the rest of the audition.”
Smart may have believed in Einbinder’s acting talent more than Einbinder herself.
“In the beginning of shooting, I felt a great deal of imposter syndrome because I had never acted before. It is intimidating being with these actors who are such lifelong professionals.… I was like, I feel out of place, I feel wrong here, they should have gotten someone with more experience,” said Einbinder, who interlaces this same earnestness into her stand-up—whether discussing women’s roles in society, or her bisexuality. (In one joke, she compares men to Vegas: “I show up. I lose everything that I came with. I vow never to return again. And then six months later I’m like, Let’s go to Vegas.”)
“I very easily can spiral into believing the worst things,” said Einbinder. But while filming Hacks, and getting to contribute her own jokes, she became more comfortable and incrementally more confident. “As time went on, I began to feel like this experience really changed my brain chemistry in a way that I’ve been trying to change it my whole life. I’m really wired without self-esteem, to be honest with you. I don’t feel that it was built in me. But it came to the point where, I respect Jean so much, and I respect [Hacks creators] Paul, Lucia [Aniello], and Jen [Statsky] so much. If they say I’m doing a good job, and I respect them and their opinions, then I can choose to believe them. It’s made me feel a lot better.”
Deborah and Ava go on to forge an unlikely mother-daughter dynamic and mutual respect as Ava begins to understand how difficult it was to carve out a trailblazing path in comedy decades before she was born. There is a moment in the third episode, “A Gig’s a Gig,” when Hannah pores over Deborah’s archives, realizing for the first time what Deborah has achieved. Vanity Fair asked whether Einbinder had a similar light bulb moment when realizing the impact of her mother’s career. (Newman was a founding member of the the Groundlings comedy troupe and an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, appearing on the show between 1975 and 1980—a time period in which Newman would later say she battled drug addiction.)
“With any child and parent, most of the early years are this dynamic of a child feeling misunderstood by their parent,” said Einbinder. “There’s a distance that doesn’t really get smaller until you get older and realize that your parents do know what they’re talking about—and they have been in your shoes, and any mistakes they have made have been because they’re human beings. It’s not really in terms of comedy, but in terms of life, that the older I get the more overwhelmed I am with empathy for my parents—specifically for my mom, who has overcome a lot in her life, and who really did her best with me and with my sibling.”
Einbinder has one joke about her mother in her act. “My mother had me when she was 42, because before that age she was…” Einbinder pauses. “Busy.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Einbinder explained that she knew her mother was different from other moms early on—not because of Newman’s career, but because she “was older than all of the other moms. She like, needed a knee replacement, and I was this hyperactive kid, sometimes getting really antsy to do certain things that she felt kind of limited to engage in with me. But the older I get, the more I arrived at this idea that my mom is much more than a mom, and has a life beyond my family and her role as a mother and beyond me.”
“When I think about that life and how chaotic it was for her, and dark sometimes and difficult…I guess with that joke, I love summing up the twists and turns and complexity of my mom’s life as her being ‘busy.’ Just the one word to describe something that was so deep and dark and twisted and painful. And also, by the way, her having a full-on life beyond classic expectations of, quote, unquote, ‘womanhood.’ Maybe when I was a kid, she couldn’t, you know, come with me on the monkey bars—but, you know, I feel so much better off having a mom who was able to impart a lot of her wisdom to me very early on. I wouldn’t change it.”
Even though Hacks is very much grounded in its characters’ quirky, maternal relationship, the series has allowed Einbinder an unthinkable form of independence. She recently told the series creators, “Do you understand the gift you’ve given me? You have allowed my stand-up to be something that I am able to pursue as my pure art form. I don’t have to rush. I don’t have to go out headlining before I’m ready. I don’t have to push myself to pump out material so I can support myself financially. To be honest with you, before [this show], I felt really overwhelmed. Before stand-up went away [with COVID], I was really trying to push myself to rise to the occasion that I felt was necessary to support myself financially.… This was a place for me to feel affirmed and just…good.”
The show is only four episodes old—new episodes are released on Thursdays—but Einbinder is hopeful Hacks will continue beyond its first season.
“I hope this show goes on forever. I can’t believe it exists. I’m so glad it does.”
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