Kaitlin Olson brought a napkin with her onto the stage at Sunday’s HBO Max Emmy Nominee Celebration. She knew she’d need it.
Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs was moderating a panel with three of the show’s guest-acting Emmy nominees — Olson, Christopher McDonald, and Lauren Weedman — when he asked Olson a question he had been sitting with since the series wrapped: how had she been so funny on screen this year while, off camera, her father was dying?
“Well, I brought a napkin, so everything’s going to be OK,” Olson said, dabbing her eyes before she got into it.
Her father, she explained, had been declining throughout the shoot — all while she was also filming her ABC series High Potential, the two schedules constantly colliding. On her first day back on the Hacks set for the final season, she got word he’d been rushed to the ICU. “I’ve got to go,” she remembers telling the crew. Nobody made her feel guilty about it. “You just hugged me and said, ‘Go,'” she told Downs. Hannah Einbinder texted Olson afterward that the whole crew was thinking of her.
Shooting a comedy while grieving was the hard part, Olson said, but her parents pushed her to keep going. “This is what we love about you,” they said. “Go do your thing. It makes us so proud and so happy.” Her father spent his final months on a ventilator at home, cared for by Olson and her mother. He lived long enough to see the finished episode.
“The most special thing is that he was able to see it,” Olson said. “It was the last thing of mine that he saw, and he thought it was so funny. He loved the clown stuff and the goat stuff.”
Downs told her the cast had no idea what she was dealing with that week. “You never let it show,” he said. “You were, I think, funnier than you’ve ever been.”
“D’Amazing Race,” in which DJ finally talks Deborah into a celebrity season of The Amazing Race, earned Olson her fourth career Emmy nomination, third for playing DJ. She loved it from the first read.
“It was such a great combination of DJ and Deborah desperately trying to bond, which I always find funny, and all of the physical comedy,” she told Gold Derby on the red carpet. That included milking a real goat on camera. “I’ve never been more proud of anything in my entire life,” she said. “That milk was real, and I’m very proud of it!”
Video courtesy of HBO Max.
