HANNAH EINBINDER BORN STANDING UP

With her star turn on Hacks, the comic turned actor has established herself as one of Hollywood's most exciting young talents-much to her own surprise.

- Raymond Ang

HANNAH EINBINDER thought she was being written out of a job.

She was reading through the script for the secondseason finale of Hacks, the awardwinning HBO series for which she'd received an Emmy nomination. In one pivotal scene, her character-caustic Gen Z comic Avawas going to be fired by her boss, the legendary comedian Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart). During her first year on the show, Einbinder had grappled with an intense case of imposter syndrome: It was her first acting role and she frequently felt out of her depth, like a lottery winner with a new BMW and no driver's license. The Emmy nomination for her work on the first season of the show didn't help. "The Academy's sad for me," she convinced herself. "They feel bad for me, they're giving me a nomination."

So she took that season's cliff-hanger as the confirmation of her worst fears. She was sure that she was looking at her last script.

"I thought I was being written off the show-deadass.

Not even kidding," she says. "I was literally like, I knew it. I'm bad. I suck at this."

"She called us crying," recalls Lucia Aniello, one of the creators and showrunners of Hacks. "She did think that she was getting fired."

Einbinder didn't need to worry. "The truth is," Aniello tells me, "Hannah showed up to set on day one of season one being perfect. I think now she realizes that there isn't really a show without her." And with her, the show has boomed. The second season was another smash, and its third season exceeded even those very high expectations, burnishing its reputation as one of the best shows on TV.

These days, Einbinder can tell the story of her spiral while laughing incredulously, as she did when we sat down for a meal at her neighborhood Vietnamese restaurant in East LA. "I think about that now and I go, Girl, are you out of your fucking mind?"