Well, Deborah Vance certainly didn’t bomb at the Emmys 2021. The inimitable Jean Smart won her fourth career Emmy award on Sunday for her hilarious and heartbreaking performance as a semi-washed-up comedian on HBO Max’s Hacks.
Smart’s leading-actress win amounted to something of a hat trick for Hacks, which won both outstanding writing for a comedy series and outstanding direction for a comedy series right before Smart’s victory. She received a standing ovation after Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang announced that she had won. Smart began her speech by thanking her friends on Mare of Easttown—for which Smart was also nominated this year–and acknowledging her late husband, actor Richard Gilliland. “I would not be here without him,” she said, choking back tears.
“Hacks has been such a thrill,” Smart added, before thanking the show’s creators—recent Emmy winners Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky, and Paul W. Downs—and apologized for not being able to attend Aniello and Downs’s wedding the week prior. She even got a good joke in by mixing up her agent’s name, calling him “Steve” instead of “Scott.” Smart ended her speech by thanking her costar Hannah “Mind-bender” Einbender, who had lost in her own category earlier in the night, calling her “a natural.”
“They’re playing the music, so I have to stop,” Smart said, as “Time to Say Goodbye” began to play. “I love you all and I thank you all very much,” she added, before exiting the stage.
Smart was the odds-on favorite to take home the best-actress-in-a-comedy trophy, capping off a banner few years for the stalwart actor. Smart began her career onstage, but emerged as TV royalty on the ’80s sitcom Designing Women. She would go on to win two guest-actress-in-a-comedy-series Emmys for her turn on Frasier, as well as a supporting-actress Emmy in 2008 for Samantha Who? While she worked consistently, Smart experienced a career revitalization in the late 2010s with plum supporting roles in FX’s Fargo and HBO’s Watchmen, both of which earned her Emmy nominations for supporting actress in a limited series.
In Hacks, Smart finally got the opportunity to move from supporting actress to series star, in a role tailor made for her immense talent. “There’s so much happening now, with rewriting the narratives of women in popular culture, and I just feel like people have finally caught up to Jean Smart,” Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs told V.F. Smart’s long-overdue leading role as the trailblazing, acerbic, and hard-to-please comic Deborah Vance sees her play opposite newcomer Hannah Einbinder as Ava, the young comic tasked with punching up Vance’s stale punch lines. In an interview with V.F., Einbinder, who’s nominated for best supporting actress in a comedy series, described Smart as “a legend,” adding, “I respect Jean so much.”
As she said in her speech, Smart lost her husband of over 30 years, actor Richard Gilliland—whom she met on the set of Designing Women—while shooting Hacks. “I had to actually work the week after he died,” Smart told V.F. in May. “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.”
Earlier this year, Smart won the 2021 Television Critics Award for individual achievement in comedy for her work in Hacks. She was also nominated tonight for best supporting actress in a limited series for her role as Fruit Ninja–loving mother to Kate Winslet’s detective in Mare of Easttown. Hacks, which has already been renewed for season two, is also nominated for outstanding comedy series.
— At Long Last, Jane Campion Returns to Film With The Power of the Dog
— The Kominsky Method: When Paul Reiser Didn’t Recognize Paul Reiser
— How Seth Meyers Turned Internet Toxicity Into Emmy-Nominated Gold
— RuPaul’s Drag Race Changed Television—And the World
— Jason Sudeikis and Elizabeth Olsen on Entering the World of Streaming
— Sign up for the “Awards Insider” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage.
