Laughing HARD and LETTING GO
Actress Jean Smart on her hit TV series Hacks, what she loves about being 70 (nothing!) and life after the death of her husband.
Jean Smart has always loved the stories that old stuff tells. “I’ve been fascinated by where it’s been, who’s owned it before and what their lives were like,” says Smart, 70, of the items she’s been scooping up at garage and estate sales for years. “It excites me!” It’s why she appreciates that her Los Angeles home was once a tiny farmhouse in the 1920s “with a fireplace in the kitchen that you could cook a cow in!”
There’s no cow in the fireplace today, but she’s sitting in that kitchen with her two kids—Connor, 32, and Forrest, 13—and her dog, Foxie, as she speaks with Parade after a long day of work. The veteran actress, who got her big break in the 1980s sitcom Designing Women, is in demand. “The last four or five years, it’s just kind of incredible,” she says of roles in Fargo and Mare of Easttown and starring in the hit HBO dramedy Hacks. “I mean, sometimes I think, Goddang—where were you 20 years ago?! But I’m not complaining!”
What’s behind her recent wild success? “I don’t know, maybe other women my age are just starting to retire,” she says with a laugh. “I was all that was left!”
On May 12, Smart brings that snappy humor back to season two of Hacks (HBO and HBO Max), reprising her role as Deborah Vance, a stand-up comic forced to energize her act with the help of a young television writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder, who is herself a stand-up comic and the daughter of Saturday Night Live original cast member Laraine Newman). When Smart first read the script for Hacks, she was all aboard. “Between that opening scene where she’s doing stand-up, and then the scene where she meets Ava—which is just hilarious but excruciating to watch—I said, ‘I have to do this; I have to.’ ”
The show revolves around the relationship between the women, so radically different on the outside, but with similar internal struggles.
Heading into season two of a hit show feels like there’s a target on their backs, says Smart, who won an Emmy last year for her role. “Like we have to prove ourselves,” she says, admitting she wondered about the feisty fun and caustic chemistry of the characters’ relationship. “I was worried that would be gone, but [the writers] have replaced it with equally funny stuff!”
Plus, she has settled into playing Deborah. “I’m a lot like her. We’re both vain and we both like leopard print,” she says, laughing. “But in the deeper levels, we’re not at all the same. [Deborah] kind of feeds off her bitterness; it almost energizes her, which is very sad.” Smart considers herself “a very optimistic person. I’m not bitter. I don’t hold grudges, and I’m all about my kids.”
Designing a Career
Smart grew up in Seattle, Wash., the second of four siblings. “I was the family ham” with a classic middle-child personality, she says. “You know, don’t rock the boat, and be the one that’s always good.” She devoured old movies featuring stars like Susan Hayward and was a good student with an untroubled childhood. “I know it makes me sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but I lived in a neighborhood where every day after school, we’d get on our bikes or we’d play kick the can, and in the summer, we’d put on plays in our neighbor’s garage.”
Her parents, who served in World War II, taught her a strong work ethic. Her mother, Kathleen, was a homemaker and a seamstress who would make beautiful clothes for her kids; her father, Douglas, worked as a high school history teacher, sold encyclopedias door-to-door, painted
houses and taught night school. Smart initially saw herself pursuing nursing, social work or veterinary medicine. But drawn to the stage during her senior year of high school, she decided to major in drama at the University of Washington.
She thrived in the spotlight, performing in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, regional theater and on Broadway, then was off to Hollywood, where she secured guest spots and short-lived series roles—until she broke out playing sweet-but-scattered Charlene Frazier from 1986 to
1991 on the hit sitcom Designing Women. “There really wasn’t a show like that,” Smart says of the series about strong Southern belles running their own interior design firm. She recalls how she and her co-stars (Dixie Carter, Delta Burke and Annie Potts) “would get weird questions from reporters, like, ‘Oh boy, what’s it like with four women on a set together?’ I finally said, ‘Would you ask the guys on Barney Miller that question?’”
Smart met her husband, actor Richard Gilliland, when he played Potts’ character’s boyfriend on the show. “He was hilarious,” she says. “He would riff on something to the point where I was gasping for air, you know? He had that kind of mind.” She and Gilliland wed in 1987 in Carter’s rose garden in Hollywood. The two were married for 43 years, until Gilliland passed away suddenly last March.
Following five successful seasons on Designing Women, Smart went on to win Emmys for a recurring guest role on Frasier and as a regular on Samantha Who? and nab Emmy nominations for her role on 24. “Then I went through a little dry spell,” she says. “I wasn’t getting offered things or auditions.” She took on a role she wasn’t crazy about for a comedy pilot. Then, after much deliberation, she decided to pull out. About 24 hours later, she was asked to audition for the juicy role of a crime matriarch in the second season of the gritty FX TV series Fargo. “I felt like the universe was rewarding me for being true to myself.”
Smart’s Fargo role as Floyd Gerhardt earned her critical acclaim and began a career resurgence. She was a superhero turned FBI agent in the comic-book saga Watchmen; she played the sharp-tongued mother of Kate Winslet’s character in Mare of Easttown; and her starring turn in Hacks earned her top honors from several critics’ associations. “If I can hear the character in my head,” she says, “and I can do something fun and it isn’t something I’ve really done before,” she’s all for it. This winter she’ll appear with Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in the film Babylon from La La Land director Damien Chazelle. Then she’ll play Olma Macy Harwell, a real woman who ran an Alabama charm school, in Miss Macy.
So now that she’s hitting her professional prime, what else is good about being 70? “Ha ha! Nothing!” She cackles.
“What are you, nuts?” She says old age was foretold to her, sort of. “A million years ago, I had two separate psychics tell me I was gonna live to be 98, so I’ve decided I’m going to live to 98. That’s made me really happy. Until last year.”
Losing her husband “was so shocking on so many levels,” she says. “I just assumed we would grow old together, and now I feel like I’m just going to grow old alone. I mean, I’m gonna have my children, obviously, but they have their own lives.” Her older son, Connor, is interested in sound editing, her younger just got into a great high school. And as the three of them are finding their new normal as a family, Smart is finding new ways to laugh. Luckily, her kids are funny. And her Hacks co-star Einbinder always gets her going. “Our favorite thing in the world is to make each other and other people laugh,” she says.
Now, after a life telling stories in TV and film, Smart is looking at her own story differently. She’s even considering a move out of her beloved former farmhouse. “The older I get, I realize I don’t need all this stuff.” She’s talking about the treasures she’s collected but also about all that pressure she’s felt since childhood to not rock the boat, to be a good girl. She wants to shed that too.
“You can’t please everybody all the time. I worry too much about that,” she says. “All you can do as an adult is make sure you have a handful of people around you that you love and truly wish you well.”
Visit Parade.com/jean to see the meme that makes Smart crack up.