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, decompressing after a long day of work. The veteran actress, who got her big break in the 1980s sitcom Designing Women, has become a highly in-demand one. “The last four or five years, it’s just kind of incredible,” she says of her recent run, including 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!” This month, Smart brings that snappy humor back to season two of Hacks (May 12 on HBO and HBO Max), reprising her role as Deborah Vance, a famous 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 two women, so radically different on the outside, but with similar internal struggles, as Ava chafes at the haughty resistance she initially meets from the comedy legend. “There’s that magical time of getting to know each other,” says Smart, “and then, when the familiarity kicks in, um, maybe it’s not so magical.” Heading into the second season of an acclaimed show feels like there’s a target on their backs, says Smart, who received an Emmy last year for her role. “Like we have to prove ourselves,” she says, admitting she wondered how she and her co-star would keep the feisty fun and caustic chemistry of their characters’ relationship stoked for a second season. “I was worried that would be gone, but [the writers] have replaced it with equally funny stuff!” Plus, by now, Smart has settled into playing Deborah. “I’m a lot like her in surface ways. We’re both vain and we both like leopard print,” she says with a laugh. “But in the deeper levels, we’re not at all the same.” Deborah “kind of feeds off of her anger and her bitterness, [and] 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, Washington, 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.” As a little girl devouring old movies featuring stars like Susan Hayward, she 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, were both funny and 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 and took on extra jobs selling encyclopedias door-to-door, painting houses and teaching night school. Smart initially saw herself pursuing a service career, perhaps in 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 to one guy, ‘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,” says Smart. “He would riff on something to the point where I was gasping for air, you know? He had that kind of mind.” She asked him for help with a crossword puzzle; he invited her to see a play he was doing, “and I went to see it three times. It was not a great play, but I’m a good laugher. So the producers said, ‘Will you come back whenever there’s a critic here? You got the audience going!’” She and Gilliland wed in 1987, at her co-star Dixie Carter’s rose garden in Hollywood. The two were married for 34 years, until Gilliland passed away suddenly last March. Following five successful seasons on Designing Women, Smart made the most of the next two decades, winning Emmys for a recurring guest role on Frasier and as a regular on Samantha Who? and nabbing 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. The deal put her on hold for over a year and a half, and production still hadn’t begun. So 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 Fargo, the gritty FX TV series inspired by Joel and Ethan Coen’s hit 1996 movie. “I felt like the universe was rewarding me for being true to myself.”
A Star Is Reborn
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. And she’s continued to trust her instincts, remaining true to herself when choosing roles. “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 alongside Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Tobey Maguire in the highly anticipated film Babylon from La La Land director Damien Chazelle. Next up is a film role as real-life figure Olma Macy Harwell, 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 film and TV sound editing, her younger just got accepted to 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,” she says, “is to make each other laugh, and make other people laugh.” Now, after spending her life playing characters and portraying stories on TV and in the movies, Smart is looking at her own story differently. She’s even considering a move out of her old, beloved former farmhouse and into a new place. “I look around and I realize I’ve just accumulated way too much junk,” she says. “The older I get, I realize I don’t need all this stuff.” She’s talking about the physical things in her house, including all the treasures she’s collected over the years. But she’s also talking about things that have been piling up inside her. It’s 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.”
Jean Smart Facts
What I’m reading: In Order to Live, a recounting of a young woman escaping from North Korea into China with her mom. “It’s hair-raising. And you realize ‘God, other people are going through so much. And they still manage to find joy and humor in things and just put one foot in front of the other.’” Earliest movie crush: “Sal Mineo. He was in a couple of young, rebel-kind of movies. He was Italian, kind of small, dark hair, dark eyes, and oh, I just thought he was so cute. I had a picture of him cut out of one of those movie magazines and taped to my wall in grade school.” Actresses I admire: “I love Sarah Paulson, Meryl Streep and, oh gosh, Hannah Einbinder.” Secret talent: “I do a really good Woody Woodpecker impression. I like to do it on the set occasionally to startle people if everybody needs to wake up a little bit.” Favorite drink: Like her Hacks character, Deborah, Caffeine-free Diet Coke. “And we both like a vodka martini, slightly dirty.” Music I listen to: “I do love the oldies, like Sinatra and Tony Bennett. But occasionally, I’ll go for a drive and listen to country music, and occasionally classical music or jazz. But I’ll always listen to the oldies from the late ’60s—the Turtles, the 5th Dimension. And Frank—as dreadful a person as he was—I’ll always listen to him.” Guilty pleasure: “Ruffles potato chips, chardonnay and watching HGTV.” Favorite joke: “Ever since Richard passed, a friend of ours has sent me three or four little memes and cartoons every day on my phone. One was, ‘When a regular dog sees a police dog, do you think they say, “Oh God, no, it’s the police!”?’ That’s gonna sound really dumb, but it made me laugh!” Favorite time of day: “Late morning on a Sunday, my favorite day, when I get up. I know that no one’s gonna call me and ask me stuff and I can just kinda hide out. I’m not a morning person, so it’s ironic that sometimes I have to get up at 4 a.m. and go to work. But I have always said the only reason to get out of a nice, cozy bed is if you’re getting paid, or taking a child to school. That’s my philosophy of life.”
