Men's Lifestyle May 29, 2026 0 Comments

How Paul W. Downs Predicted the Shocking Twist Ending of Hacks from Day One—And What It Means for Fans

Ever wonder how you’d face the final curtain after a five-decade rollercoaster in comedy? Paul W. Downs knew from the jump how Hacks would wrap — not with a bang, but with a bold, haunting quiet: Deborah Vance, the indomitable Vegas comic, opts to take control of her story right to the end, even if it means bidding farewell alongside Ava Daniels. Sounds heavy, right? But this isn’t just a tale about goodbyes — it’s a gritty, no-holds-barred dive into the life of a woman defying the chokehold of a male-dominated industry, wrestling with heartbreak, betrayal, and the fight to reclaim her authentic voice. Behind the scenes, the journey was just as wild — from pandemic setbacks and fires to near-miracle shoots inside the Louvre. It’s a story of resilience, grit, and relentless humor—things I deeply respect in fitness and in life. Let’s unpack how Hacks not only ended but also defined what it means to keep pushing when the world’s trying to shut you down. LEARN MORE

10 min read

This story contains spoilers for the series finale of Hacks.

Paul W. Downs always knew how Hacks would end. The show’s protagonist, comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart)—after a five-decade career rich with triumphs, spoils, and setbacks—would be diagnosed with cancer and decide to kill herself, with professional assistance, in Switzerland. Her antagonist-turned-platonic-love-and-writing-partner, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), would be at her side to say goodbye.

The seasons and substance in between the HBO Max comedy’s pilot, which premiered in May 2021, and its series finale would make this twist deliver—a wig-off, bowels-deep exploration of the life of a woman in comedy, in Las Vegas, who wants to dictate the end of that life on her own terms, after so many years of industry heartbreak and humiliation, reigned over by the male peers and bosses who never quite let her be herself. A woman who hawked merchandise from her branded empire on QVC, whose fortune was seemingly built through everything but her authentic comedic voice, and whose late ex-husband got sole credit for the breakout show they wrote together. A woman divorced, betrayed, overlooked, reborn, whose curtain would fall, inevitably, as all curtains do.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, you had a five-season plan,’ ” Downs tells me, with a wave of his hand. We’re seated at a table inside the Esquire office’s archives room—quiet, windowless, floor-to-ceiling stacks of print issues behind us.

Paul W. Downs in a professional digital setting portrait

Florence Sullivan

Sweater by Fendi Men’s.

“The truth is,” he says, “we had a plan for where the show went and for the very last episode,” but not for what would transpire in the interstices. That very last episode aired this Thursday night, but when Downs and I first spoke, it—the culmination of six years’ worth of effort herding this creation to its final resting shape, plus five years of conceptualizing and development beforehand—was still several weeks away.

“When we pitched [Hacks], we pitched the final episode,” Downs continues. “We pitched the idea that Deborah gets a diagnosis, she wants to call her own night, and she wants to go to Dignitas.” The HBO executive listening in stopped them and said, “You don’t have to continue, because I want to do it.” The stuff of Hacks’s middle was never written in stone. That would only come into focus once Downs and his cocreators, multi-hyphenates Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky (the former Downs is married to) began to till their show.

The trio soon got to work. They reached their long-promised final episode in the end, even if only by the skin of their teeth.

Hacks has shined a light on Downs as a metamorphic writer, director, actor, and showrunner. But he’s donned multiple hats for most of the decade-plus he’s been working in Hollywood. He spent his youth in New Jersey and college years in North Carolina, where he studied theater at Duke University. After graduation, Downs moved to New York City and enrolled in improv class at Upright Citizens Brigade, where, in addition to meeting Aniello, he buddied up with future fellow alumnae Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, who cocreated Broad City, the Comedy Central juggernaut that ran from 2014 to 2019, which Downs acted in, wrote for, and executive-produced.

On paper, his was the kind of seamless transition from improv standout to television star that toiling artists can only dream of, and his range has been on public display ever since—along with the biceps, carved like butter, that he sometimes posts photos of on Instagram (he played a trainer, got buff for the role, and never looked back) and that Men’s Health recently featured in its video about his chest and shoulder day.

At 43, given the hypothetical choice between writing, directing, and acting, Downs answers immediately: acting. “If I could only do one, it would be to perform,” he says.

His character on Hacks, talent manager Jimmy LuSaque Jr. (the last name alone deserves an Emmy), is the straight man perennially ensnared in the inanities and insanities and indignities of the heedless characters around him, particularly that of his nepo-assistant-turned-business-partner Kayla Schaeffer (Meg Stalter).

Jimmy is a rare bird in a ruthless jungle: kind, steadfast, loyal, and, like his counterparts, a little absurd. His evolving dynamic with Kayla—whose screwball presence is its own magnum opus—functions as an ancillary heartbeat behind the primary plot. “Meg and I had a spark from the beginning, a chemistry that was so fun and exciting for both of us, and we grew to really love each other,” Downs says of their characters’ ionic bond.

Downs refuses sole credit for anything he’s made. Most of the work he is most publicly known for depicts cliché-free stories about women, like the 2017 film Rough Night (the tale of a bachelorette party gone abominably wrong, directed by Aniello and starring Downs as the googly-eyed husband to Scarlett Johansson’s higher-powered wife). Many a podcast episode in this vibe-shifted, post-2024 cultural landscape is rife with tawdry takes on why women aren’t funny. Downs, for his part, is earnest when he declares the opposite: “Women are funnier than men. Period.”

The women of Hacks rave about him. “He is truly one of the most spontaneous and present actors on our show,” says Einbinder, via email. “He never does the same thing twice. He’s the person who makes me feel the most natural in my performance when I’m across from him.” She adds, “He’s one of the funniest people on earth.”

Paul W. Downs in a digital portrait for ESQ magazine

Florence Sullivan

Sweater by Fendi Men’s. Vintage jeans by Levi’s. Ring by Liza Jane.

For Smart, one of the funniest scenes from the series is one that she wasn’t in; it’s Downs and Stalter on an airplane, Jimmy proposing that Kayla stay on to work with him as his partner. “The woman in the seat behind them hears proposal and thinks they’re a couple,” Smart says, over the phone. “And then she thinks that Jimmy’s maybe a lesbian. He gets so annoyed and his voice goes up three octaves.” Smart laughs. “Paul is just brilliant.”

After five years, five seasons, and 12 Primetime Emmys later, including three for the Aniello-Downs-Statsky trinity, Hacks leaves the airwaves a critical and commercial darling. Production had begun in earnest in the pre-vaccine wilds of the pandemic, in the fall of 2020. The dystopian strangeness of filming behind protective masks and face shields meant that, outside of the lead actors, no one really knew what anybody looked like until season 3. Even with safeguards in place, multiple outbreaks of Covid shut down the set for weeks at a time.

Paul W. Downs portrait captured for ESQ Digital

Florence Sullivan

Over the course of six years, cycles of grief and life ripped through the set with equal tenacity. Smart’s husband passed away during the shooting of season 1. Aniello went into labor in the middle of directing the finale of season 2. Smart had emergency triple-bypass heart surgery in the middle of season 3. The 148-day Hollywood writers strike began two months later. The 1915 Spanish Colonial Revival property used as the location for Deborah’s “side mansion” burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire in January 2025. Downs describes how at one point assistant director Jeff Rosenberg turned to him and said, “This is the most snakebitten production I’ve ever worked on.”

But Downs tells me they never once entertained giving up. This show was their baby—Downs describes it as his and Aniello’s firstborn—and they were not going to quit. (Their human firstborn is the aforementioned child who was nearly delivered in the middle of filming.) “We just never, ever, ever considered it,” he says.

And so, through death, disease, and wildfire, the group pressed on. By fall of 2025, the end was in sight. Anchoring both plot and production were always Deborah and Ava—the reluctant collaborators who eventually gutted themselves open and apart for each other and for each other’s work. By the end, the years of Deborah and Ava’s blistering arguments, sweat, blackmail, and one lesbian cruise gave way to an unrelenting love that grew and grew until it became the very thing that, for Downs, the show was about.

Florence Sullivan

Jacket and trousers by Thom Browne. Shoes by Manolo Blahnik.

On its face, Hacks is about two complex, oft-squabbling female comedians, generations apart, and the many ways in which those generational differences bring out the worst and, ultimately, best in one another. The fibrous core is Deborah’s politically incorrect boomer to Ava’s woke millennial (arguably Zoomer cusp). But there was always a deeper philosophical inquiry planned for the series finale. “The finale is about what is worth living for—what is the true joy and meaning of life,” Downs says. “For us, it’s laughing with your friends. So the fact that Deborah’s will to live is reignited by pitching with her partner—I hope that’s really hopeful and uplifting.”

For Smart and Einbinder, Hacks was always about their affection for each other—both on- and off-screen. “Jean and Hannah were close from the beginning, but it deepened over time,” Downs says. Smart called Einbinder before her audition. “And in the audition, she gave her a little bit of advice because Hannah was moving like a stand-up; she was pacing. Jean stood up and whispered to her to stand still.”

When the table read for one of their final scenes rolled around, Einbinder was, in her words, “completely hysterical. I knew engaging with it over and over was going to be really painful, and it was. … I watched it with Paul, Jen, and Lucia at Paul and Lucia’s house for the first time, and I was sobbing in Lucia’s lap.”

Portrait of Paul W. Downs captured in a digital setting

Florence Sullivan

Sweater, trousers, and boots by Loewe. Ring by Liza Jane.

When the fifth season began filming in September 2025, the fundamental arc of it was—miraculously—exactly what Downs, Aniello, and Statsky had proffered from the start. The finale would be shot in Paris, where Deborah and Ava could relish in cafés and repartee and fine art before Deborah left on her one-way ticket to Switzerland. They wanted to shoot at the Louvre, got the green light to film there on a day it was closed, and wrote a substantial section of the episode specifically for the museum.

In one scene, Deborah and Ava would view Dutch painter Judith Leyster’s 1630 masterpiece The Carousing Couple and then, walking from room to hallowed room, remark on the rhyming nature of history—Leyster’s painting was originally attributed to her male peer Frans Hals until her signature was discovered hidden behind his, two centuries later.

The episode would be a full-circle moment for Deborah and Ava. It would be melancholy, bittersweet. And it would be—and was—canceled before it began when four thieves swept in, Soderbergh-style, on an October morning in 2025 and heisted more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of jewelry.

Downs shakes his head. “The Louvre said, You can’t shoot here.” They considered moving the finale to the Palace of Versailles, but the royal estate vaguely resembles Deborah’s Vegas château, which would’ve been confusing to viewers and has no misattributed works housed inside to make the point they wanted. The Louvre relented and agreed to let 12 people in, total, to shoot the finale. The team was ready. And then the Louvre went on strike. “We called Versailles back,” says Downs. “And you know what Versailles said? Fuck off. We had nowhere to shoot.”

Despite the crackling will of the universe to derail them, the president of the Louvre resigned in February of this year, the strikes ended, and the museum finally, with no time to spare, agreed to let Hacks bring in its skeleton crew. “It always works out,” says Downs. “And it did.”

Their day in the museum wound up as the last day of filming. Using a slimmed-down crew was not without its challenges. “I was physically on the ground taking Jean Smart’s boots off as Jen and Lucia are moving a bench and Paul’s doing touch-ups on Hannah’s makeup,” Rosenberg remembers. “On a normal show, if you had this important emotional scene that was written to take place in the Louvre, and you find out you can’t film in the Louvre because of international espionage, you freak out a lot more. But we just kept going.”

There were a few reasons why people didn’t freak out. Chief among them is Paul Downs.

Florence Sullivan

Sweater by Fendi Men’s. Vintage jeans by Levi’s. Ring by Liza Jane.

“He is just wonderful,” says Smart. “I know another executive who was an agent for years at William Morris Endeavor, and he always had the unofficial title of the nicest guy in Hollywood because he’s such a nice, nice man. I guess people think that’s an anomaly. But Paul is right up there in the same category.”

Near the end of our conversation, Downs shows me a picture on his phone. It’s an image of the gang of 12, misty-eyed and wrapped around one another, the Louvre’s vaulted ceilings overhead. “The first time I watched Lucia’s director’s cut,” he says, “I was heaving.” Downs has since seen the edit dozens of times, but it still presses a nerve. “I guess it’s like dropping your kid off for college and being like, ‘They’re never going to come back to the house.’ It’s the final season. It now [belongs to] everybody else.” Aniello was the one to call it a wrap on the series. (Smart remembers that “there were a lot of tears and croissants.”)

Before the final credits roll, Jimmy and Kayla find themselves onstage, presenting to what’s left of the talent agency they just commandeered control over (through no lack of Machiavellian means). Several of their perennial foes quit on the spot after deciding Jimmy’s claim that “good work” will save the agency is “gay;” several more after that upon learning that their Sugarfish lunch budget will be cut. Jimmy appeals to the remaining agents’ consciences that what “got you into this business in the first place—representing artists and helping them to do great work” is also the thing that should inspire them to stay. Downs’s face is rapt throughout; his expressions and inflections double as a kind of anti-Jordan Belfort. In an industry frazzled by debt and disintegration and consolidation, it’s a surprisingly hopeful note—one that feels like quintessential Downs, not merely the character he plays on TV.

Hacks is not Downs’s final act. About what’s next, he can only hint: “We’re working on something for HBO.” (This is not news—in 2025, Downs and Aniello signed a multiyear deal with Warner Bros.) In the meantime, he got across what he wanted to say. “The world is tough, and you’ve got to follow the fun and try to spread joy,” he says. “And the fact that I get to do that with my wife and my best friend—what a crazy-lucky guy.”

Opening image credits: Sweater, trousers, and boots by Loewe. Vintage ring by Liza Jane.

Photographs by Florence Sullivan

Styling by Alfonso Fernandez Navas

Grooming by Jessica Ortiz using Westman Atelier

Esquire Executive Design Director: Martin Hoops

Esquire Visual Director: James Morris

Esquire Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler