Following her Emmy win for Wet Hot Summer Hacks, Hannah Einbinder is now set to take on one of the “final girl” roles in the horror-comedy film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
Until a few years ago, Hannah Einbinder had barely ever screamed in earnest.
“My anger would turn into sadness so quickly,” the actor says. She is speaking in June from a quiet corner of House of Pies, a Los Angeles restaurant in the Los Feliz neighborhood, before the evening rush begins.
“There was never really a space in my life where I was allowed to be angry.”
Growing up in California, Einbinder was a competitive cheerleader between the ages of 11 and 14. She was a “point flyer,” one of the team’s most coveted positions. But being taller than the other girls made it harder for her to maintain her balance. Whenever she made even the slightest mistake, the entire team had to do conditioning drills as punishment.
“At the time, I was constantly thinking, ‘I can’t make a mistake. I have to be perfect and I have to do the best because this isn’t an individual sport.’ If I make a mistake at a competition, my teammate’s score goes down too. I think I internalized that very deeply.”
“For the first time in my life, I screamed with my whole lungs”
In 2023, when production on Hacks was halted by the Writers Guild of America strike, a friend suggested that Einbinder see a reiki practitioner who lived in Ojai, California.
The practitioner told her that her throat chakra was “completely blocked.”
“‘You can do this. You need to get it out,’ she told me,” says the 31-year-old actor.
“And for the first time in my life, I really screamed with my whole lungs.”
Einbinder believes the experience gave her portrayal of Ava Daniels, the blunt, bisexual comedy writer at the center of Hacks, a new depth. She says she particularly felt its impact while filming the intense confrontation in the third-season finale.
“I don’t know what my performance would have been like if I hadn’t gone to the reiki practitioner. It was a complete happy accident.”
Horror and inner reckoning collide in her new film
The actor believes the experience also helped her with Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
A tribute to bloody horror movies, the film stars Einbinder as Kris, a young director. Fast-talking, queer and constantly trapped inside her own thoughts, Kris carries an intense sense of shame around sexuality. Although she tries to project an air of ease, she is someone who suppresses her emotions.
In the film, Kris is tasked with reviving the long-dormant Camp Miasma horror franchise, set in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. To do so, she tries to bring Billy, the star of the original films, back in front of the camera. Billy is played by Gillian Anderson.
“I had to confront myself”
Einbinder says she immediately realized how psychologically challenging the character would be when her manager sent her the script.
“It was a piece of work that made me feel extremely vulnerable in every possible way.”
According to Einbinder, most people experience, at some point in their lives, a sense of being disconnected from their bodies or of feeling uncomfortable in them.
“I’ve experienced that too, but I never talked about it with anyone.”
As she began preparing for the role, Einbinder says she realized just how deeply the issue had affected her own life.
“When I started doing the work I needed to do to play the character, I realized how real this was for me. I was like, ‘Fuck, this is actually way more serious than I thought.’ I realized that when I was experiencing sexual intimacy, I had almost never actually felt inside my body. I really had to question why.”
From the stand-up stage to television
When Einbinder auditioned for Hacks in 2020, she had never even performed onstage in a school play. At the time, she was working exclusively as a stand-up comedian.
Her mother, Laraine Newman, was one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live. Her father, Chad Einbinder, has worked for years as an actor and director in commercials. Her brother, Spike Einbinder, is also a comedian.
While studying television writing and production at Chapman University in California, Einbinder became interested in stand-up after she happened to open for comedian Nicole Byer.
After graduating, she returned to Los Angeles, spending her nights driving from one end of the city to the other in search of open-mic shows where she could get just three minutes onstage.
“Just being born and raised in Los Angeles is a huge privilege in itself,” she says.
The breakthrough with Hacks and the transformation of her acting
Despite having almost no significant acting experience on her résumé, Hannah Einbinder landed the role of Ava Daniels on Hacks at the age of 25 after a three-stage audition process. The first audition took place in person just before COVID-19 lockdowns began.
Suddenly finding herself acting opposite television veteran Jean Smart, Einbinder describes the first season of the show as “boot camp” and “being thrown into the fire.” Five years later, she says she has gained the kind of experience many actors can only dream of.
Einbinder’s natural talent was evident from her first-season scenes opposite Smart, but her acting reached an entirely different level in the show’s final season. It is difficult to believe that the emotional final scenes in which Ava tries to stop Deborah from ending her life through euthanasia during their trip to Europe were performed by the same actor audiences met in the first season.
Einbinder says closely observing veteran character actors such as Laurie Metcalf, Helen Hunt, Jane Adams, Luenell and Susie Essman played an important role in that development.
Jean Smart describes her co-star this way:
“One thing people don’t know about Hannah is that she has an incredibly deep and thoughtful side.”
Smart says she would often see Einbinder reading books about Judaism on set.
“She experiences emotions incredibly intensely. She’s extremely strong and very serious.”
At the same time, Smart also points to Einbinder’s playful side.
“She was the one who organized the parties on set. She was always arranging get-togethers at tiki bars.”
Her most challenging performance yet
Jane Schoenbrun, the director of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, says she first became aware of Einbinder through Hacks.
When Einbinder’s name came up for the role, Schoenbrun says she reread the script.
“Something happened that had never happened to me before. I started hearing the lines in her voice, and everything fit perfectly.”
The camera tests confirmed her decision.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is an incredible face.’ A face that can convey so much emotion, and we’d only ever seen her as Ava.”
The film’s final scene proved to be one of the most demanding shoots of Einbinder’s career.
She had to convey the central idea of the film with a single look, shed a single tear, successfully complete a technically complicated scene, and do all of it while covered in blood from head to toe.
The shoot was so exhausting that everyone on the crew apparently needed a cigarette before heading home. Einbinder says that even after she went home, ate and slept, she still felt emotionally drained the following morning.
Schoenbrun says one of the actor’s biggest fears is being covered in sticky substances.
“She said it made her feel like there were bugs or ants crawling all over her. And we asked her to do the same scene over and over again.”
By comparison, her intimate scenes with Gillian Anderson, or the scenes in which she runs through the campsite in her underwear while fleeing a killer, were much easier for her.
Having previously appeared topless on camera in Hacks also made her less apprehensive about nudity, she says.
“I don’t think about my body that much.”
Einbinder also admits that she is not particularly disciplined when it comes to exercise, summing it up with a joke:
“I guess my body is like tea. It just kind of takes care of itself.”
Her identity and political views
During the interview, two necklaces around Einbinder’s neck catch the eye.
One is a small Star of David, the same necklace worn by her Hacks character Ava.
The other bears the Yiddish word “doikayt,” written in Hebrew letters. Roughly meaning “hereness,” the term was one of the core principles of the General Jewish Labour Bund, the Jewish socialist and anti-Zionist movement founded in the late 19th century.
Einbinder explains why she wears the necklace:
“I feel incredibly connected to my ancestors and I’m proud of them. I wanted to connect with my people. But I also wanted that connection to be left-wing and aligned with my own values. Anti-Zionist Jews today are also trying to carry on that tradition.”
Her statements on Palestine
Einbinder has also drawn attention for her public statements about Palestine since October 7, 2023.
At the 2025 Emmy Awards, she made headlines when she ended her acceptance speech with the words, “Go Birds, fuck ICE, Free Palestine.”
She says she did not want to leave the stage without saying something.
Before 2023, she says, she had described herself as both a socialist and a Zionist.
“That’s how you realize how powerful propaganda is. That was the one exception within my entire belief system.”
Einbinder says questioning ideas she had accepted as true throughout her life has been a painful but necessary process. She credits books by Edward Said and Peter Beinart with playing an important role in that transformation.
She also describes having long, sometimes difficult conversations about the issue with her Hacks co-star Poppy Liu, saying the process ultimately strengthened their friendship.
“It’s my responsibility to speak”
Einbinder says she has not faced any major professional repercussions because of her political views, although she acknowledges that she is not universally liked in Hollywood.
“It’s clear that there are people in the industry who don’t like me.”
But she says her intense workload leaves her with little time to dwell on it.
What disappoints her most, she says, is seeing so many people with enormous resources choose to remain silent.
“I really struggle to understand how people with this much money, power and influence don’t realize how many lives they could save.”
She describes her own responsibility this way:
“Trying to contribute to the normalization of anti-Zionist discourse.”
She doesn’t want her private life in the spotlight
A few weeks after the interview, tabloid reports said that Einbinder was dating journalist Jasper Nathaniel.
Nathaniel is currently reporting from the West Bank and shares his observations from the region on social media and Substack.
Einbinder, however, says she does not want to discuss her private life publicly.
“I didn’t want this to become news. I just prefer to live my life out of the public eye.”
At the end of the interview, they visit Skylight Books in Los Angeles together. Usually more inclined toward nonfiction, the actor wanders through the fiction section to give her mind a break. She eventually buys Open Throat, a novel about a queer mountain lion living beneath the Hollywood sign.
A Cannes award, new projects and plans for the future
A few weeks before the interview, Hannah Einbinder attended the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film won the Queer Palm, the festival’s award for LGBTQ+-themed films. Previously won by directors including Todd Haynes and Céline Sciamma, the prize is among Cannes’ most prominent parallel awards.
On the Cannes red carpet, Einbinder wore a white Celine dress, while for the film’s press screening she opted for a knitted Alaïa dress and oversized sunglasses.
She describes the Cannes experience this way:
“In terms of glamour, it was more iconic than anything I’ve ever experienced.”
The film received the response they had hoped for from French audiences, and Einbinder later attended screenings in New York and London with director Jane Schoenbrun.
The British audience’s reaction particularly surprised her.
“They’re supposed to be more reserved, but the theater was incredibly enthusiastic. They were laughing really loudly.”
According to Einbinder, humor plays an important role in helping the film’s message reach audiences.
“The film is really trying to say something important. I think when people laugh, that message is able to land more easily.”
A new goal: action comedy and a period film
After Camp Miasma receives its wide release in August, Einbinder will once again walk the Emmy Awards red carpet. She earned her fifth Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her performance in Hacks.
She also has several new projects in the works.
She is developing an action-comedy film in which she would star. She is also writing a “stoner comedy” with her best friend Sandy Honig, with the two of them set to appear in it.
She would also love to make a period film.
“Any period. I don’t care.”
Einbinder says people often tell her that her face looks “like it came out of an old painting.” She adds that Jean Smart independently told her that she would be perfect for a production set during the Gilded Age.
The actor emphasizes that she wants to build her career on her own terms.
“I constantly question the ethics of living within a capitalist system. So it’s important to me that I’m making most of my income from my own labor and from my art.”
She ends with a laugh:
“I could certainly fail. But it won’t be because I didn’t try.”
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