KUALA LUMPUR, May 10 — At 70, actress Jean Smart is finally getting her long-overdue spotlight by playing the legendary stand-up comedienne Deborah Vance on the HBO Max hit series Hacks.
The show explores the hilarious relationship between Deborah, a Las Vegas showbiz legend and her entitled millennial writer Ava, played by newcomer Hannah Einbinder.
The critically acclaimed series won three Emmys including Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series has been called one of the best shows on television, further underscoring the glaring gap in popular culture about the stories of older women.
Hollywood has long been criticised for having limited roles for actresses once they hit a certain age but shows such as Hacks and Grace and Frankie prove that if you write it and write it well, viewers will come flocking.
“I would love it if our show helped change that a little bit,” Smart told Malay Mail in a Zoom interview recently.
She added that the very fact Hacks is so popular with men as well as women speaks a lot to the fact that if you tell a good story and entertain people, it doesn’t matter if it’s about an older or younger person, man or woman — it will work as long as it’s a good story.
“The thing about being an older actress is obviously there are some roles you simply cannot play because only certain kinds of roles are available to you — you can’t play someone who is pregnant for instance,” Smart said.
But she believes the industry has come a long way in realising that stories about women are every bit as fascinating.
“Maybe even more so in the fact that we discover stories about women who have done things that were extraordinary that usually only men did because men don’t have the same reality,” the Mare of Easttown actress added.
“We don’t necessarily find a story about a man who did something a woman did quite as compelling so maybe we have a slight advantage even there.”
Season 2 will see the dark mentorship between Deborah and Ava continue to evolve, as the two travel across the country workshopping Deborah’s new stand-up act.
Einbinder, who plays Ava, had beat out over 400 actresses for her first TV role and landed the golden opportunity to act alongside one of the most talented women in showbusiness.
“I watched her lead by example, she showed me so many intricate tiny, detailed actions that exist within the craft itself that I wouldn’t have been aware of as a viewer my whole life.
“I don’t know what she (Smart) possibly could have learned from me but I learned a lot from her,” the 26-year-old newcomer said.
One thing is for sure, the two women love laughing and making each other cackle on set and off.
“We send each other memes constantly, mostly Jean, she’s like a meme god, she has the funniest memes right from Facebook, they’re so cute and so funny we laugh about those all the time,” Einbinder said.
“So many things make me laugh, Hannah makes me laugh,” said Smart.
“Sometimes it’s just silly, juvenile humour and other times it’s something that’s a joke or a story that’s so well constructed that the ending takes you by surprise and its cleverness you can’t believe you didn’t see it coming.”
Finding the perfect Deborah Vance
Hacks creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky came up with the idea because they wanted to make a show they could watch that was both funny and emotionally grounded.
“We wanted to find somebody who could believably play a stand-up but also really deliver on the more dramatic turns that the character takes and Deborah also had to be over 65,” said Downs, who also plays Deborah and Ava’s manager Jimmy in the show.
“That wasn’t a very long list but Jean Smart was at the top of that list.”
Smart, who has starred in Frasier, Sweet Home Alabama and Watchmen, had always wanted to be a standup and she connected with the role immediately.
“That part was a miracle, it was a dream come true because she said yes and, in that way, it wasn’t a long casting process,” said Downs when the team met with Smart.
Casting the part of Ava took a longer time as the team wanted someone very young and new on the scene who had a good dynamic with Deborah.
The trio of creators who previously worked on the sitcom Broad City drew from their own experiences as writers when making Hacks.
“There are little bits and pieces of all of our experiences that are put into each character and the scenarios,” Statsky said.
Asked if they were concerned about woke culture stifling the creative process of making Hacks, Aniello said, “There’s no fear of that when people are creating things from an honest place.”
But more importantly, the show was released when audiences needed a good laugh from being under lockdown coupled with a pivotal moment in popular culture when the media was re-examining its representation of high-profile women such as Britney Spears and Marcia Clark.
“We’re at a time where the narratives especially of women in popular culture or in the media are being rewritten and more and more, we are realising the stories we got wrong.
“A story about a woman who is overlooked or cast aside or misrepresented also was weirdly ripe,” said Downs.
Hacks Season 2 premieres May 12 only on HBO GO.
