After building a career in comedy, the 27-year-old landed her first screen role in the series about the relationship between two female comics. And after being twice nominated at the Emmys, she is finally starting to believe she is doing a good job
There’s a scene in series two of Hacks that Hannah Einbinder can’t bear to watch. In it, her character Ava is in the crowd as her boss – storied, old-school comedian Deborah – performs a standup show aboard a lesbian cruise. Deborah arrives on the stage dad dancing to Pharrell’s Happy (“Oh no, she’s doing Ellen,” Ava sighs), before proceeding to comprehensively bomb, offending everyone in the audience and riling the captain’s wife (who she assumes is married not to a woman but a man, because of course only a man can captain a ship). “God, it’s painful – it’s really cringe to watch,” says Einbinder. “So tough. I feel for her because I know just how it feels.”
Einbinder is living what she describes as an “incredibly meta” existence. As well as performing her own standup comedy (she’s on tour in the US when we speak, with a stint in London on the horizon), the 27-year-old stars in a series that revolves around it. Hacks centres on the unlikely bond between Ava – a down-on-her-luck, entitled millennial comedy writer – and Deborah (TV veteran Jean Smart), an equally down-on-her-luck, Joan Rivers-esque comic inching closer towards retirement with every hokey gag she performs on stage in Las Vegas. Together, this oddest of odd couples attempt to revamp Deborah’s tired image from QVC saleswoman back to comedian, while interrogating the misogyny and double standards that have underpinned her career. Of course, it wouldn’t be as moreishly watchable – and critically acclaimed – as it is if there weren’t several bumps in the road, from ill-advised email exchanges to human ashes being accidentally thrown in the bin.
