‘Comedy was my way of feeling good – and for the most part, I really didn’t feel good’ … Hannah Einbinder. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Comedy was my way of feeling good – and for the most part, I really didn’t feel good’ … Hannah Einbinder. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian Film Interview ‘I was born without self-esteem’: Hannah Einbinder on Hacks, her buzzy queer horror – and being Hollywood’s most outspoken star Nadia Khomami The Hacks lead was cast in meta-slasher sensation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for her ‘deranged physicality’ – but it’s a fitting role for an actor who has made a point of confronting shame and speaking her mind
Fri 31 Jul 2026 09.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google ‘G od is good all the time,” laughs Hannah Einbinder. She’s fresh off a plane from Los Angeles and curled up barefoot in an armchair. This, she says, is “a crazy time in life. Starring in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the midst of Hacks ending … it’s definitely an embarrassment of riches.”
Hacks is the HBO comedy that ended earlier this year; in May, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer meta-horror, became the breakout hit of this year’s Cannes film festival.
Read more In the film, Einbinder plays a film-maker, Kris, who becomes consumed by her obsession with Billy Presley, the reclusive star of the original Camp Miasma slasher franchise – played with hypnotic wit and sensuality by Gillian Anderson . What begins as an attempt to persuade Presley to return to the series spirals into an ecstasy of sex, death, VHS tapes and junk food. Scene by scene, the lines between reality and fantasy begin to collapse.
“When my agent sent me the script, I was blown away,” says Einbinder. “Its through-line of confronting shame and dealing with repression and dissociation was intriguing to me.” (It’s a theme Schoenbrun has said was inspired by their own process of learning to embrace sexuality after transition.)
“We’re discouraged from discussing this stuff,” says Einbinder, “but it’s something I’m familiar with. I had to think: ‘How true is this for me?’ Like Kris, I had to mine my own experiences and confront things I didn’t want to see.” The film, she adds, helped her “be more open about desire”. It was also “a roadmap for how it’s supposed to feel and what one should feel comfortable with doing or saying, and when to say no”.
Dressed in a floor-length black dress and a flowing white silk kimono, Einbinder cuts a more glamorous figure than I had expected. On screen, her style and comedy often veer towards the oddball; in person, she is refined, softly-spoken, and deliberately cautious.
Her willingness to sit with discomfort feels characteristic of the actor, whose performances often hinge on the tension between awkwardness and emotional honesty. Schoenbrun has said they cast her in her Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma because they “found her deranged physicality exciting”.
View image in fullscreen As Ava Daniels, with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), in Hacks. Photograph: HBO Max Most immediately significant is Einbinder’s gift for creating electric chemistry with older female co-stars. In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Hacks, she spends much of the time opposite another glamorous and formidable woman.
In the long-running series, Einbinder played Ava Daniels, an aimless comedy writer hired to revive the career of Jean Smart’s Las Vegas standup legend, Deborah…