“Hacks” stars Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder on the rollercoaster finale — and the scene that made Einbinder feel ‘pathetic’

Key Points

• Hacks stars Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder break down the emotional series finale.

• Einbinder admits she had a hard time filming one particular scene, where she begs Deborah to change her mind about a big life decision.

• Smart explains why she thought the final moments of the episode are the “perfect” ending.

This article contains spoilers about the series finale of Hacks.

Hannah Einbinder just couldn’t bring herself to watch the Hacks series finale.

“I’m really scared. We’ve been talking a lot about how I’m going to see it because I think it’s important to create a controlled environment. I simply cannot watch that for the first time in a group of people,” she tells Entertainment Weekly a couple of weeks before the release of the Emmy-winning HBO Max comedy’s final episode, adding she’s probably going to watch it at co-creator Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello’s house (which she eventually did) “so that I can promptly put my bare feet in grass and just lay there in their backyard, probably weeping. The experience of making it is still so visceral for me that I feel very close to the thing itself, even though I haven’t seen it.”

Her costar Jean Smart admits she was also “afraid” to watch, “in the sense that I hope what I was trying to do with it comes across.”

For good reason. After five seasons, Downs, Aniello, and their co-creator Jen Statsky took a big swing with the final installment, where Smart’s Deborah Vance — the legendary comic who revived her career and found herself at the top of her game, was able to get her dream job hosting a late-night show before giving it up in protest over boss Bob Lipka (Tony Goldwyn) forcing her to fire Einbinder’s Ava as head writer, and mounted an enormous redemption show in Central Park — reveals to her collaborator and best friend Ava that she has cancer and is going to go to a right-to-die facility in Switzerland after they vacation in Paris…and she wants Ava to be there with her.

Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart on ‘Hacks’
Credit: Courtesy of HBO Max

Ava — like the audience — was shocked at Deborah’s plan, but she was resolute in her decision, refusing to put up yet another fight or go through potentially life-draining treatment. She wants to go out on top, with people remembering her for her incredible Central Park show — not for how she looked at the end.

“Painful,” Einbinder recalls of first reading the scene, which plays out at Carbone restaurant in Las Vegas, overlooking the Bellagio fountain. “Ava is like, ‘This isn’t your decision. There’s a lot of other people that have a say in this.’ So it’s the frustration of not having control over it. It’s pain and sadness. She’s angry because she feels personally confronted. Some decision is being made on her behalf. This affects her. I think she’s not able to see past that. She feels like this is something that’s being done to her. And that’s incredibly painful.”

Reluctantly, she agrees to accompany her friend, first to Paris, where Ava finally gets to eat “real bread,” they shop, they go to the Louvre, which Deborah has rented out just for the two of them, they go clubbing. The next morning, Ava presents Deborah with a packet of information on new treatments — desperate, especially after witnessing her friend living life to the fullest the night prior, to convince her to live. “Please don’t leave me. Please,” she tearfully pleads to no avail.

“That was hard because I really wanted to cry, but they didn’t want Deborah to cry really. And she had to be strong and had to let Ava know that this was just not working out the way she wants,” Smart recalls of filming the scene. “She knows how much she’s hurting her, and that makes her feel terrible, but she’s not considering changing her mind at all. That was a hard scene for Hannah.”

Einbinder admits she was “definitely nervous” to film that one. “I knew where I needed to go emotionally and I was scared. And frankly, when I was shooting it — I told Paul and Lucia this last night at dinner — I actually felt pathetic. To embody what Ava was feeling in that moment, I was fully experiencing what she was experiencing and I was looking around the room between takes and I felt ashamed and embarrassed and pathetic that other people were seeing me cry like that,” she shares. “I know that sounds weird because it’s my job, but I literally felt humiliated…. I’ve never experienced that…. It did go away. When we moved on, I sort of transitioned to feeling a level of…I would say pride. I felt like I had done what I wanted to do, and I was happy with my work, and that’s what I started to feel after a while. But in the moment doing it, I just felt like s—.”

Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder on ‘Hacks’
Credit: Courtesy of HBO Max

When it’s time to leave Paris for Switzerland, the two start making jokes as they sit in a cafe, enjoying some coffee and croissants. Ava makes a quick run to the restroom ahead of their final journey, after they have been casually one-upping each other with a better punchline, about the “best part of dying.” Deborah takes out her notebook to write down the joke, realizing at first that it doesn’t matter because she’s about to end her life, but a split second later, realizing how much joy that little moment gave her, how comedy — an Ava — is her lifeline. She’s changed her mind. “I may not have 30 years, but I think I have another hour,” she tells Ava after chasing after her in the crowded station. “Will you help me write it?”

“She just couldn’t give it up, no matter what. She couldn’t give it up. Despite her fears, natural fears, of course, of being sick and uncomfortable and possibly in pain and even worse, looking terrible, even despite all that, she still had that drive and that desire to work and to write jokes,” Smart explains. “It’s her engine, and she just realized at that last minute, like, ‘Damn it, I still want to do this. I’ll hang out. I’ll see what happens.'”

While Einbinder didn’t know the twist, she sensed something was coming.

“I just was like, There’s no way they’re going to do this to us. They can’t do this to us. They’re not going to do this to us. They’re not going to do this,” she recalls. Then, when I started to see them riffing at the train station, I was like, Oh, okaaaaay. She’s pulling her back in, living for comedy. I knew when they were riffing, I thought that it was going to be what kept her stubborn ass. Also, it’s so f—ing classic, Deborah. The second Ava’s like, ‘Okay, I accept it,’ she’s like, “Well, I don’t want to do that.” It’s like, Are you f—ing kidding me? Okay, girl.“

Smart thinks it was the “perfect” set-up for her revelation. “It’s not saying, ‘She’s going to live happily ever after. She’s going to be okay.’ We don’t know,” the actress says. “She might be okay, she might not. But she’s not going to do what she had planned to do. She’s just not ready. She thought she was completely ready until she got the spark again and realized this is what the life force is inside of me. This is what it is. And I’m not ready to snuff that.”

Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart on ‘Hacks’
Credit: Courtesy of HBO Max

And so the two venture back to Las Vegas, happy, laughing, walking down the Strip arm-in-arm as the Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland duet “Happy Days Are Here Again / Get Happy” plays.

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“I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s heaven. I love it,'” Smart recalls upon being told what music would play over the final scene. “It’s perfect because it’s a duet. And the way they had to time the Bellagio fountains took so much work and so much cooperation with the fabulous Bellagio Hotel, which I love. I spent my 25th wedding anniversary there. The Bellagio never does that, but they did for us, and it was really cool to time that walk and that drone shot with the fountains going up.”

Einbinder thinks they “couldn’t have picked a better song. These divas — Ava Daniels, Deborah Vance, Judy, and Babs — It’s totally perfect,” she says. “Paul, Jen, and Lucia really set out to make a comedy that was beautiful, and it’s just beautiful filmmaking…. I talked to Adam Bricker, our DP, about this, and we just think it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly