HACKING haanah

She may be comedy's brightest young star, but for Hacks breakout Hannah Einbinder, making her way to the top of the entertainment industry has been serious business. Mostly.

- BY LESLEY M.M. BLUME

It's early morning on the east side of Los Angeles, and Hannah Einbinder-still sleepy but impressively cogent has ordered tea and a kimchi scone and is contemplating what it means to tell her life story to a stranger with a tape recorder.

"There's stuff that I would very freely tell you sitting across from each other," says the actress, who turns 30 this month. She's flying under the radar this morning, wearing a sweatshirt and a baseball hat pulled down over her brow. "But when you know you're being recorded...

I don't know that I necessarily would tell the entire human population of Earth." A sizable portion of that population is already familiar with Einbinder's highly particular brand of humor: raw but not ribald; quirky, even peculiar, but menschy. This cocktail earned her a role as the co-star of the Max series Hacks, in which Einbinder plays Ava Daniels, a millennial comedy writer who has been canceled after posting a sophomoric sexual tweet about a U.S. senator. Daniels is then tasked with resuscitating the career of a Vegas-based force of nature, the baby boomer standup comedian Deborah Vance, a character modeled partly on Joan Rivers and played with ruthless glee by Jean Smart.

Unlike Lena Dunham's hapless millennial character on Girls, who controversially anointed herself the voice of her generation, Einbinder and the creators of Hacks have steered clear of declaring Ava emblematic of any larger group. "A generation doesn't have a voice," Einbinder tells me. "It has many voices."