Hannah Einbinder, the writer Ava Daniels was too scared to become

Hannah Einbinder

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 21, 1995 Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Actress and stand-up comedian
Known for	Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Awards	Emmy · Critics' Choice · Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival · Astra TV · Dorian TV

The question people keep asking Hannah Einbinder is whether playing Ava Daniels ruined her or made her. Ava Daniels — the wrecked, brilliant, ethically inconsistent writer at the center of Hacks — is the kind of character that sticks to an actor, a coating of someone else’s disaster that takes years to scrub off. Einbinder played her for five seasons and 47 episodes, losing the Emmy every year for the first four, while critics consistently called her the best performance in the series. She finally won the year the show ended. That is either a punchline or a lesson, and she has never quite said which.

She grew up in Los Angeles in a house where comedy was not a career aspiration but a household language. Her mother, Laraine Newman, was one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live — the class of 1975, alongside Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Dan Aykroyd. Her father, Chad Einbinder, worked as an actor, writer, and director. Her older sibling, Spike Einbinder, is also a comedian. The mechanics of a laugh were present at the dinner table long before Hannah Einbinder ever stepped onto a stage to try them herself.

She studied television writing and production at Chapman University, where she joined the improv team and figured out, opening for Nicole Byer at a campus show, that stand-up was the specific thing she wanted. What followed was deliberately unhurried: years in small clubs, building material, not auditioning for the spotlight. The Just for Laughs festival invited her to its New Faces showcase in 2019. NPR named her one of ten comedians to watch. Vulture noticed her absurdist charge. None of it made her famous. She was, by all accounts, fine with that.

In 2021, Hacks changed the arithmetic. HBO Max’s comedy about an aging Vegas stand-up and her young, compromised head writer — Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels, played by Jean Smart and Einbinder — was immediately received as the sharpest comedy on television, the kind of show that critics and awards bodies agree on without quite knowing why they agree. The chemistry between Smart and Einbinder was the subject of serious analysis: two performers operating at different registers who somehow made the distance between them feel like trust. Emmy nominations followed for Einbinder in each of the show’s first four seasons. She was, each year, described as the harder performance to pull off — holding Ava together while the character was deliberately, structurally falling apart. And each year she went home without the trophy.

The show itself kept escalating the demands. Season 4 put Ava inside a late-night writers’ room where the cost of compromise became the plot engine; Season 5 sent Deborah and Ava to Paris, then closed the door on both of them. The series finale aired on May 28, 2026. Einbinder had won her Emmy the previous September, at the 2025 ceremony, where she accepted the award and ended her speech with “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine” — a sentence that generated the predictable rounds of outrage and praise. Her win for Hacks Season 4 was long enough overdue that the room understood it without needing to discuss it.

Stand-up continued alongside all of it. A national tour in 2022 gave her new material, which she worked into Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go, her debut special released on Max in June 2024, filmed at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. The special is structurally peculiar in the best sense: she performs as the sun, the moon, and the earth at one point; she talks about being queer, being Jewish, being frightened about climate change and forgetful about everything else. It does not sound like a television actress doing a side project. It sounds like a comedian who had things to say that would not fit inside a network comedy.

The critique that followed Einbinder through the Hacks years — quiet, persistent, not always wrong — was that she was playing a version of herself: smart young person from a comedy family, using wit as a defense mechanism, fumbling the larger choices. She acknowledged as much in interviews, carefully enough not to sound ungrateful, clearly enough that it registered as self-knowledge rather than complaint. Ava Daniels is not Hannah Einbinder. But the performance worked partly because Einbinder understands from the inside how a person who can construct a perfect sentence can still be constitutionally unable to commit. That self-knowledge is what the Emmy voters eventually rewarded. It is also what she brought to the films she made the moment the show ended.

Seekers of Infinite Love, directed by Victoria Strouse and premiered at SXSW in March 2026, cast her as Kayla Bachman, one of three estranged siblings driving to Kentucky to retrieve their youngest sister from a cult. Justin Theroux and Greg Kinnear play her brothers. The film was received warmly — one of the most assured family comedies of the year, critics wrote, grounded where it needed to be and outrageous where it could afford to be. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by Jane Schoenbrun and co-starring Gillian Anderson, premiered at Cannes in May 2026 and won the Queer Palm. It opened in the United States on August 7, 2026. Einbinder plays Kris, a queer filmmaker hired to reboot a slasher franchise who becomes obsessively entangled with the reclusive star of the original. The two films could not be more different. That she made both in the same year is the clearest indication yet of how broadly she intends to operate.

She is bisexual, publicly so, and has talked about it in the stand-up and in interviews without treating it as a revelation. She is a Philadelphia Eagles fan with the kind of devotion that passes for a personality trait in certain households. She has ADHD. Her parents, who divorced in 2016 after 25 years together, gave her the kind of comedy education that does not come from a classroom. She was also a competitive cheerleader as a teenager, which she mentions occasionally in material, in the same tone someone might mention a parallel life they still cannot quite explain.

The 2026 Emmy season has positioned her for a second consecutive win, for Hacks Season 5. Whether that happens or not, the arc from an unhurried stand-up opening for Nicole Byer at a college show to winning the Queer Palm at Cannes is complete enough to read on its own terms. The question people keep asking — whether playing Ava Daniels made her or cost her — probably does not have a single answer. She seems to understand that. The films she is making are the answer she is choosing to give.