In ‘Hacks,’ Jean Smart Explores the TV Road Not Taken (original) (raw)

When Jean Smart was 11 or 12, she saw legendary stand-up comedian Phyllis Diller on TV. She thought, I want to be her. “I didn’t think it would take this _long,_” she told me, laughing.

This week, Smart crosses that item off her bucket list. She stars in HBO Max’s new comedy Hacks as a besequined Las Vegas comedian named Deborah Vance who commands a marquee stage show, resides in a sumptuous estate, and moonlights as a QVC saleswoman. Smart rose to fame as a sitcom star in the late ’80s on Designing Women, but lately she’s been focusing on drama—running a crime syndicate in Fargo, investigating superheroes in Watchmen, and dedicatedly playing Fruit Ninja as Kate Winslet’s mother in Mare of Easttown. (“I’d never played Fruit Ninja. I’d never heard of Fruit Ninja. And the prop guy comes over and shows me what to do, and I’m thinking, What if I just go nuts?”)

But in the half hour Hacks, from Broad City veterans Paul Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky, Smart gets to be a stand-up comedian. She plays the big-haired, caftan-peddling, bedazzled Deborah as a spitfire, whose temper flares in the first episode when the casino management threatens to downgrade her live act unless her material improves. In a fit of pique, she reaches across the lunch table and stabs her boss’s remaining steak with a fork—then takes the steak and fork with her out the door. Smart had to stifle a laugh when I reminded her of the scene.

“One of my descriptions of Deborah is, less is less,” she said. “I’m gonna have to get that made as a sampler and hang it in the dressing room.” What she meant is that Deborah embraces her hard-won success on a simply massive scale. She zooms around the Nevada desert in a royal blue Rolls-Royce, swans about her mansion in elegant resortwear, wears heels even when she’s alone in the house, and collects priceless antiques in lighted curio cabinets.

Smart was drawn to the Hacks scripts because of how well written her character is. “I love that Deborah is kind of inconsistent or unpredictable. You know, she has very different relationships with all the different people in her life. And it’s a testament to the writing that they all seem to make sense,” she said. “She’s incredibly generous, she’s incredibly cheap, she can be incredibly kind, and incredibly abusive. But it all seems to just make sense. That was fascinating to me, and makes it very fun to play.”

There are a few eerie similarities between Smart and Deborah Vance as well. They share a wig, for one thing. “She styled it a little differently than I normally would wear it,” Smart said. “But yeah, it’s always fun to wear wigs. Because I have, as you can see”—she fingered her short coif—“no hair.” Also like Deborah, Smart’s game is blackjack. She joked that she’d be impoverished if Hacks had been shot where it’s set, in Las Vegas. Like Smart, Deborah got her big break on a sitcom, an invention called Who’s Making Dinner? that was supposed to have debuted in 1973.

And right after we meet Deborah, we learn her ex-husband has just died. Smart’s own husband of 34 years, Richard Gilliland—whom she met on the set of _Designing Women_—died in March. The last time she went to Vegas, they were celebrating an anniversary. “We stayed at a really nice hotel and we got to this restaurant. We went to a great show. We played some blackjack, we might have won a little bit of money. So that’s the way you want to do Vegas. If you can do all that, it can be a lot of fun.”

She began to cry, then gracefully wiped the tears away from her face. “I had to actually work for the week after he died,” Smart said. “Which was, I guess, in some ways, a good distraction, but otherwise hard, because there was a funeral scene. But yeah, I wish I could share all this with him.”

Gilliland was also an actor, known for his role in _24_’s fifth season. But he prioritized Smart’s career over his own. “He gave up a lot for me to be where I am. I mean, he really sidelined his career the last five or six years so that I could take advantage of these incredible roles that I’ve been offered,” Smart said. He ran lines with her from Hacks, supporting her to the end. “He was a tough critic, and he just thought that scripts were amazing. Just amazing.”

Here’s where Smart’s and Deborah’s careers diverge: trust. Despite Deborah’s manifest success, she’s almost entirely isolated, emotionally marooned from those who might love her most. Meanwhile, Smart said, “I trust everybody. I think everybody’s always got good intentions. Well, there’s a couple people I can name.” She pivoted from earnestness to muttering humorously, pretending a threat to settle her scores in print. It’s astonishing, how much of a pro Smart is: Even with tears in her eyes, she’s prepared with a punch line.

Without the warmth of family life, Deborah uses her luxe trappings to counterbalance her isolation. “It is sort of like an armor or even…working from the outside in,” Smart said. “I mean, we all understand this. When you get dressed up for a formal event, you feel different; you’re accessing a different part of your personality and it makes you feel different about yourself.” The intimacy in her life comes out in specific, compartmentalized ways: Her most trusted employees, her immature daughter (Kaitlin Olson), and her two corgis, whom she pampers with steak dinners in the first episode. Smart loves working with animals. The dogs were supposed to have different names onscreen, but Smart nixed that.

“I thought, no, no, no no. First of all, I said, let’s give them their actual real-life names, so the job’s a little bit easier. The poor dogs must be so schizophrenic—like, Why are you calling me that?! So I decided that they should be their real names, which were Cara and Barry. I said, ‘It’s perfect. [Deborah] named them after Barry Manilow and what’s her name, the girl from Fame. Irene Cara.’”

Smart doesn’t have Deborah’s taste—though she’d “take the kitchen in a hot second,” she said. But being surrounded by expensive things gave her insight into Deborah’s character. Chief among them is Deborah’s Rolls, a magnificent tank of a machine, ridiculously unnecessary and therefore utterly fabulous. Smart had not driven a Rolls-Royce before this role, so she was surprised to learn that there’s a built-in umbrella in the door—which by the way, opens to the rear. “Sometimes it’s hard not to just gouge yourself,” she said.

She took care to clarify that she did not drive the Rolls in the scene at the end of the pilot (“I wanted to! But it was not me!”), where her character chases down Ava—the 20-something comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder) that her manager sends in to punch up Deborah’s jokes. Ava and Deborah quarrel almost constantly throughout the six episodes of Hacks sent to critics, but in their antagonism, they recognize a mutual tenacity and spirit. Deborah is impressed, Smart said, by a young woman who isn’t cowed by her grandiose presence. “This is someone who might be a worthy adversary, if not a worthy coworker. The combination of that and possibly losing her show, which is her lifeblood—I mean, she can’t not work.”

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