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My ‘Hacks’ Cameo: How One Variety Reporter Ran Lines With Jean Smart, Instructed Red Carpet Extras and Nearly Broke His NDA


Go behind the scenes of Variety editor Marc Malkin's cameo on the Season 3 premiere of "Hacks."

It all started a month earlier, when an HBO publicist sent me an email in the fall of 2022 on behalf of “Hacks” co-creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Stasky to invite me to appear in an episode of the upcoming Season 3. A van comes to take me and two other reporters who also have cameos — Rachel Lindsay from “Extra” and Gerrad Hall from Entertainment Weekly — along with “Hacks” star Carl Clemons-Hopkins, to the carpet, which is built outside the lobby of a Culver City office building. We have dinner (chicken grape salad with sweet chili sauce for me), get mic’d up and make small talk with Smart about Los Angeles traffic while waiting a couple of hours before cameras start rolling.

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