Paul W. Downs isn’t afraid to admit that Hacks season 4 guest star Julianne Nicholson “literally scared me.”
In the Emmy-winning comedy’s ninth episode, Nicholson’s character, TikTok star Dance Mom, has spiraled out of control with her newfound Hollywood fame. Downs’ Jimmy and his colleague Kayla (Megan Stalter), find their client passed out — on Universal Studios’ Wisteria Lane, of all places! — after a bender. The only possible fix to wake her up to perform on Late Night With Deborah Vance (Jean Smart)? A lil pick-me-upper.
“The amount that she needed that cocaine, she is so committed and so good that there were moments that I was like, ‘I’m worried about this,'” Downs tells Entertainment Weekly about the depths to which Nicholson takes the character.
Courtesy of Max
Megan Stalter and Paul W. Downs on ‘Hacks’
But, of course, the moment is played for laughs — her plea to Jimmy to boof her included — and Nicholson knew when she signed on where Dance Mom’s journey would take her.
“Boofing was very much there [in the script] — that’s why she signed onto the role,” Downs says, laughs filling the room from his fellow show creators Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky. Given the nature of the moment, as Kayla realizes a small bump of coke isn’t going to do the trick and that Dance Mom needs to ingest it anally for faster absorption and effectiveness, “it was one of the only scenes in the history of the show that we rehearsed the night before we shot it, because there’s so much physical comedy and choreography. There’s stunt work — she falls into a bar cart and then flops onto a couch, there’s the dunking of her head in ice water and the resetting of cocaine. There’s so much that goes on that we did actually rehearse it. Of course, there’s some improvisation on the day, but for the most part, we really had the beats laid out because there were so many moving parts to attend to.”
Stalter’s Kayla adds a whole other level of comedic desperation to the scene, yelling at Jimmy throughout the tense sequence, urging him to cut lines of cocaine into large “Gator tails!” — a “Jen pitch” on the day, Aniello recalls — rather than smaller doses.
The creators had tried to get Nicholson on a previous season of the show — Aniello says they wrote this character for her knowing that “the evolution from the sweet Canadian woman to this drug-fueled Adam Levine-texting psychopath” could feel like sketch comedy, but “because she’s such an incredibly gifted actor, we knew [she] would ground the character into something that just felt more real.”
Courtesy of Max
Megan Stalter and Julianne Nicholson on ‘Hacks’
And all of Jimmy and Kayla’s efforts pay off: Dance Mom hits the stage for another silly performance, this time getting Late Night guest Ethan Sommers (Eric Balfour) to join her before the drugs wear off and Dance Mom collapses into his arms.
“She’s just so open to improvising and reacting. Truly a dream, really,” Aniello adds. “And I’m going to go so far since she’s become a friend…and I want that in print.”
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
The Hacks season 4 finale airs Thursday, May 29 at 9 p.m. ET on Max.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
