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Until a few years ago, Hannah Einbinder had never really screamed. “Anger very quickly converted to sadness for me,” she says on a June evening in a booth at House of Pies, a Los Feliz diner that is nearly empty before the dinner rush. “There was not a lot of room for me to be angry in my life.” Growing up in California, Einbinder was a competitive cheerleader from ages 11 to 14. She was a point flyer, the most desired spot on the roster. She was also taller than all the other girls, which meant she had a shakier center of gravity—and if she ever so much as wobbled, the entire squad would have to do conditioning drills. “I can’t fuck up. I have to be perfect and excel because this isn’t an individual sport,” she remembers thinking. “If I bobble in a competition, her score is going down too. I think I really internalized that.”
In 2023, when her hit show Hacks paused production during the WGA strike, a friend recommended that Einbinder visit a reiki healer in Ojai, California. The healer informed her that her throat chakra was “completely blocked.” “She was like, ‘You can do it. You have to let it out,’ ” Einbinder, 31, recalls quietly. “And I screamed at the top of my lungs for literally the first time in my entire fucking life.” The experience allowed her to access new levels of Ava Daniels, the brash bisexual comedy writer she played on Hacks—particularly the blowout argument that closes the third season. “I don’t know what my performance would have been like if I hadn’t seen the reiki healer,” she says. The whole experience was “a happy accident.”
It also seems to have helped her tap into her character for Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a blood-soaked homage to campy slashers. Schoenbrun’s previous two narrative feature films, the 2024 Sundance hit I Saw The TV Glow and 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, use horror to explore coming of age and gender dysphoria. In Camp Miasma, Einbinder plays Kris, a fast-talking queer filmmaker with a habit for getting stuck in her own head and a deep sense of shame around sex. She’s the type of girl who wants to be nonchalant about polyamory but is ultimately repressed.
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Kris has been tasked with rebooting the dormant Camp Miasma slasher franchise in the frigid woods of the Pacific Northwest, where the movies’ original star, Billy (Gillian Anderson, giving a fabulous Norma Desmond–meets–Blanche DuBois performance), now lives alone in the abandoned summer camp where the first movie was set. Kris’s plan is to convince Billy—whose performance for the original movie happens to have been the root of her sexual awakening—to be in her reboot. Sparks and fluids fly—but not until Kris surrenders to the possibility that “Little Death,” the film’s murderous personification of orgasm played by Jack Haven, might come for her as he tried to come for Billy, the chaste “final girl” in the original Camp Miasma films.
When Einbinder’s agent sent her the script and suggested she play Kris, she realized she’d have to dive head first into the kind of sexual dissociation that usually comes up only in therapy. “Definitely a vulnerable endeavor in basically every capacity,” Einbinder says.
“As far as I know, basically all people have at some point in their lives dealt with dissociation or feeling uncomfortable in their body. That was an experience that I had but didn’t ever talk about with anyone,” she adds, taking a more serious tone. “I didn’t examine just how true it was for me until I started getting into the work that was required to portray it. And in doing that, I was like, Oh fuck, this is actually really bad. I’ve barely ever been in my body when I’ve had sex. I needed to actually confront why that is.”
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Before she auditioned for Hacks in 2020, Einbinder hadn’t even performed in a school play. She was, at the time, exclusively a stand-up comedian. Her mother, Laraine Newman, is one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live and has worked primarily as a voice actor after leaving the sketch series; her father, Chad Einbinder, is “a working-class actor” from the Philadelphia area who has appeared in and directed commercials. (Her brother, Spike Einbinder, is a comedian.) While at Chapman University in Orange County, California, she got hooked on stand-up after volunteering to open for Nicole Byer on a whim. Once she earned her degree in television writing and production, she moved back to Los Angeles and spent her nights driving across the city praying for a three-minute spot at an open mic. “There’s immense privilege in just even literally being from L.A.,” she says.
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Despite a mostly blank résumé, at 25 she landed the part of Ava Daniels after three rounds of auditions, the first of which happened in-person just before the COVID lockdown. Suddenly, Einbinder found herself having to act opposite Jean Smart, a sitcom legend. Einbinder describes that first season of Hacks as “boot camp” and “trial by fire,” but five years later she emerged with the kind of experience most actors can only dream of. When Einbinder went barb for barb with Smart in the first season of Hacks, her raw talent was obvious. But it’s hard to imagine the show’s denouement—a trip to Europe on which Ava tries to persuade Deborah not to die by assisted medical suicide—being performed by the same Einbinder we saw in season one. By the end of the series, and after studying the brilliant character actors who appeared throughout (Laurie Metcalf, Helen Hunt, Jane Adams, Luenell, Susie Essman), she learned how to let the audience in.
“One thing that most people don’t realize about Hannah is that she has a very, very deep, thoughtful side of her,” Smart tells me. She would often see Einbinder on set reading books about Judaism. “She feels things incredibly deeply. She’s extremely powerful and deadly serious.” (This is not to say that Einbinder isn’t a good hang; quite the opposite. Smart notes that she was the de facto Hacks “party planner” and was “always organizing parties at tiki bars.”)
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Schoenbrun had watched Hacks before working on Camp Miasma. “When it came time to think about who would play that role and Hannah’s name came up, I had this experience that I’d never had before where I reread the script with her in my mind’s eye and read the lines with her voice, and it was perfect,” Schoenbrun says. They became even more confident after watching Einbinder during camera tests. “This is a great face,” Schoenbrun remembers thinking. “This is a face that can express so much, and we’ve only seen it express Ava.”
The climax of Camp Miasma requires Einbinder to give everything she’s got: She has to convey the film’s entire thesis in just one look, shed a single tear, ace a complicated technical moment, and do it all while covered in blood. It was a day so difficult everyone needed a cigarette before heading home, where she ate a good meal, went to bed, and still woke up with an emotional hangover. “Her literal nightmare situation is being in a bed in a puddle of goop,” Schoen-brun says. “She described it as feeling like bugs or ants just crawling all over, just like the worst feeling ever. And we were asking her to do it over and over again.” Compared to the mental and emotional work, the physical demands of the role—which included tender sex scenes with Anderson, and sprinting in her underwear through the haunted campground as she’s chased by the killer—were basically a walk in the park. Einbinder had already shown her breasts on Hacks, which demystified the concept of people on set seeing her topless. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my body,” she admits. Einbinder says she doesn’t even really work out, although she knows she should for health reasons. “I just have always been gifted with having like a …” she considers for a moment before landing on a joke. “My body is tea, basically.”
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At House of Pies, we’re both half paying attention to game three of the NBA Finals. I’m rooting for the Knicks, and after hearing a bit about Jalen Brunson, Einbinder is contemplating doing the same. Quickly, she snaps out of it. She wouldn’t dare betray her family’s allegiance to Philadelphia sports teams. Today, she’s dressed a little bit like Ava, wearing a long-sleeve brown-striped polo and a pair of baggy Celine jeans —she tells me her “normal swag” is “Adam Sandler vibes.” Throughout our conversation, Einbinder’s two silver necklaces keep catching the light. One is a tiny Star of David that Ava wears in Hacks, the other is a nameplate that spells doikayt in Hebrew letters, a Yiddish word that roughly translates to “hereness.” It was the founding principle of the General Jewish Labour Bund, an anti-Zionist group of Jewish socialists formed in the late 19th century.
“I wear it because I am so unbelievably attached to and proud of my ancestors,” Einbinder says when I ask her to translate the necklace for me. “I’ve always wanted a connection to my people, and so it’s very nice for me to be able to reconnect to my ancestors in a way that is also leftist and aligned with my belief system. This generation of anti-Zionist Jews is trying to continue their work.”
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She’s been outspoken about Palestine since October 7, most memorably when she ended her Emmys acceptance speech in 2025 with “Go Birds, fuck ICE, Free Palestine.” At the time, Einbinder thought, “I’m not going to leave this stage without saying something because I don’t feel like anyone’s going to say something.”
Prior to the 2023 attack on Israel, Einbinder had identified as a socialist while still being a Zionist. “That’s how deep the propaganda goes,” she says now. “It was the one belief system that was an outlier.” Unlearning what she had been taught to believe her whole life was a “painful process,” but one that “made it possible for me to come to live in the reality that we all do live in.” She credits books by Edward Said and Peter Beinart as being crucial on her journey as well as frank talks with members of her community. That includes her Hacks co-star Poppy Liu, who was vocal in her support of Palestinians before Einbinder. The two had “difficult conversations” following October 7. “Our friendship was so beautiful, strong, and important before that,” Einbinder says. “But also it’s deepened as a result of that.”
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Einbinder has yet to face major career blowback because of her political stance, but she knows it hasn’t made her the most popular girl in Hollywood. “It’s been made clear to me that there are people in the industry who don’t like me. I’ve been so busy on Hacks—I’ve had a full-time job,” she says, which is a polite way of saying she’s been too employed to care. In between seasons four and five, she shot both Camp Miasma and the road-trip comedy Seekers of Infinite Love, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year. “I’m immensely privileged, and that’s what upsets me about other celebs who don’t speak out,” she says. “There are so many people who have so much money and resources and power and,” she searches for her words and hangs her head in her hands. “I really struggled to understand how people don’t recognize that they are untouchable. That with their amount of followers and influence and capital, how many lives of human beings they could legitimately save—that they could prevent death.” She sees it as her responsibility “to try to normalize anti-Zionist speech.”
A few weeks after we spoke, “Page Six” reported that Einbinder was dating the journalist Jasper Nathaniel after the pair were spotted “acting like a couple” at a friend’s graduation party in Los Angeles. Nathaniel is currently in the West Bank, where he shares his reporting on Instagram and Substack. “I don’t feel super-comfortable talking about my personal life,” Einbinder tells me when we catch up on the phone. “I didn’t ask for that to be reported. I just want to keep it low-key.”
After dessert, Einbinder suggests we walk down the block to Skylight Books, where she has a membership. For some reason, the shop is blasting “Cupid Shuffle.” “I feel like maybe there was an event?” Einbinder says, as if that would make it make sense. She tells me she’s drawn to nonfiction, but today she’ll force herself to poke around in the fiction section to give her brain a break. She settles on Open Throat, a freaky novel about a queer mountain lion who lives under the Hollywood sign.
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A few weeks before we met, Einbinder took Camp Miasma to Cannes, where it was awarded the Queer Palm, a prize that recognizes LGBTQ+ films. (Previous winners include Todd Haynes and Céline Sciamma.) She appeared on the Croisette in a stunning white Celine dress. At the film’s photo call, she opted for a chic knit Alaïa dress paired with bug-eyed sunglasses. Cannes was “more iconic than anything I have ever experienced in terms of glamour with a U,” the actor says. The French crowd was laughing at Camp Miasma in all the right ways. Einbinder then joined Schoenbrun in screening the film in New York and London, where it was warmly received even by the famously austere Brits. “They were totally raucous and so loud,” she says of the London audience. “There is a real message in the film, and if people are laughing, it can sink in more, I think.”
After Camp Miasma’s wide release in August, Einbinder will gear up for another Emmys red carpet—she was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the fifth time. She’s also developing an action comedy for herself to star in; she and her best friend, Sandy Honig, are writing a stoner comedy for the two of them; and she’d love to be in a period piece. (Any period will do, but people always tell her that her face “looks like an old painting”—she and Smart independently suggested that she would fit in well in a gilded-age setting.) She wants to keep working on her own terms. “It’s important to me, as I weigh the ethics of living under capitalism, to know that I’m making the majority of my money on my work and my art form. I’m sure I will flop,” she says, laughing, “But it won’t be for lack of trying.”
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Production Credits
Photography by
Coni Tarallo
Photo Assistants:
Asa Lory and Kevin Mathein
Hair by
Davide Perfetti
Makeup by
Mitch Yoshida
Manicure by
Yukie Miyakawa
Styling Assistant
Cole Norton
Set Design by
Lane Vineyard
Set Design Assistant
German Rojas
Tailoring by
Zunyda Watson
Production by
Kindly Productions
The Cut, Editor-in-Chief
Lindsay Peoples
The Cut, Photo Director
Noelle Lacombe
The Cut, Fashion Director
Jessica Willis
The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor
Brooke Marine
The Cut, Photo Editor
Sofía Mareque
The Cut, Fashion Market Editor
Emma Oleck
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of
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