A version of this story about Hannah Einbinder and “Hacks” first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Hannah Einbinder checked in from the road, where she’d been touring as a standup comic between seasons of her HBO show “Hacks.” She’d played the night before in Boston and had just arrived in Philadelphia, and the question was irresistible to anybody who’d seen the second season of the show: Did she make the trip in a fancy tour bus with her initials emblazoned on the side, the way the legendary standup comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) does in the show?
“No, no,” Einbinder said, laughing. “I’m in a Kia sedan.”
So her real life on the road as Hannah Einbinder, 27-year-old comic from Los Angeles, is perhaps less glamorous, but also considerably less stormy, than her on-screen life on the road as Ava Daniels, joke writer for the irascible Deborah, who also happens to be suing Ava for violating her NDA in a drunken email at the end of Season 1. And life on the road for Einbinder is also better because of “Hacks,” the HBO show created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, which has given her a high enough profile to draw good crowds even though she’s only been doing standup for five years.
“It’s given me the ability to tour in the way that a comic that has been doing it for as little time as I have would otherwise not be able to,” she said. “I started in 2017, and then I took off two years for the pandemic. So it’s been such a blessing, and it’s directly affected my ability to do standup. I look at Paul and Lucia and Jen once a week and say, ‘You have given me my entire life.’”
“Hacks” received 15 nominations and won three Emmys for its first season last year, and it increased the nom total to 17 this year. In addition to Outstanding Drama Series and nods for Smart and Einbinder, it was nominated for directing, writing, cinematography, casting and five different guest actors, including four out of six in the Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series category.
“A second season can be a tricky thing, you know?” Einbinder said. “Creators of shows have their whole lives to figure out the first season. And then they just have a short turnaround between Season 1 and Season 2, which can cause various kinds of hiccups. But we got lucky, and our writers are incredible.”
Even though Einbinder is herself a comedy writer, she said she didn’t have any conversations with the show’s writing team about where Ava might be going in the second season. “They create it in a very insular way, and I don’t even get all of the scripts before we start shooting,” she said. “I get about three at a time, which honestly I like, because it allows me not to jump the gun emotionally. I can live in the story, while having no idea what they’re cooking up.”
Season 2, she said, was “a lot more physically taxing” than its predecessor. “The first season we shot mostly on the Paramount lot because we were trying to really be diligent about COVID safety because the vaccine hadn’t come out yet. And the second season takes place on the road, so we did have to travel around California — we traveled two hours outside of L.A. in every direction to cheat the California desert as being other places around the country. It made for more challenging shoot shooting days.” She laughed. “But it wasn’t so bad, because I sleep like a teenager if I’m allowed to.”
Einbinder also has no idea where the “Hacks” story is going from here — though she agrees that while Ava and Deborah are on separate career paths at the end of Season 2, it’s silly to think that they’ll stay that way. “There is this sense that these two women are tied together no matter what,” she said. “They’re both flawed and they both reveal their flaws, and that sort makes them forgive each other easily because if they can’t forgive each other, they can never forgive themselves.”
Meanwhile, the show has not only boosted her standup career but also changed what she looks for in her career. “It has opened up my mind to the possibilities that are out there,” she said. “I have since let down any strict, binary sort of qualifiers about what I can do. I would love to do funny and touching personal stories, whether that’s in film or television or standup. My ultimate dream is to continue to have the privilege to be selective about the work I do.”
She’s also aware that in a time in which the U.S. Supreme Court has essentially invited people to challenge LGBTQ rights, the opportunity to put a queer character on screen is significant, and something she rarely got to see when she was growing up. “The writers have poured their hearts and souls into all the queer characters on the show, of which there are many,” she said. “They have made them so authentic and real. That is important, and it does matter. It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly, and it feels like an honor to be included in something like that.”
Read more from the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue here.
