Kaitlin Olson on the ‘Hacks’ Finale and Losing Her Father

Olson wasn’t sure exactly how Hacks creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky planned to close out Deborah and DJ’s story. But when she read the script for the fifth episode, “D’Amazing Race,” she was elated. She lights up describing the physical comedy the episode demanded, as DJ and Deborah attempt to compete on the hit reality show The Amazing Race, shoving people out of the way in an airport, racing up a hill with a giant cheese rack, and replicating a clown dance. “It’s my favorite thing to do, especially when the character is insanely intent on doing it well,” she says. “I love getting aggressively angry about something so ridiculous.”

But underneath the slapstick, she says, is a more emotional end to her character’s arc and relationship with her mother. “Deborah on her own realizes that she has been trying to protect DJ, and maybe DJ doesn’t need to be protected,” she says. “Maybe DJ’s okay with being DJ.” When Deborah finally decided to allow DJ to sell her jewelry line on QVC, it struck Olson as both absurd and moving. “It was so beautiful. And again, so ridiculous.”

Olson was deep in production on High Potential when the request came in for her to be available for five days to film Hacks. Previously, as a guest star, Olson would just pop onto set for a couple of days here and there, but because of the ambitious nature of the Amazing Race episode, she would need to be on set more. She and her team made it work, finding a few days when she could be available over the span of four or five months. “I will do whatever needs to be done to make room for this in my schedule,” she recalls.

What she didn’t know yet was how literally that promise would be tested.

At the end of July, her father went in for a repair of an aortic aneurysm, discovered almost by accident on an MRI. It should have been a routine surgery for him, but his lungs suffered a massive inflammatory response and filled with fluid. He was rushed back into the ICU. Olson got the call while she was on the High Potential set. “I left production. I felt terrible—I obviously never do that,” she says. “I literally just got in the car and drove home, called them on the way, and was kind of shut down for a little bit.”

His lungs turned fibrotic and what followed was, in Olson’s words, “a long, slow, miserable event.” Doctors intubated and sedated him for two weeks while Olson stayed by his side with her mother and brother. When it became clear he’d be in the ICU indefinitely, she began flying back and forth between Oregon and her Los Angeles sets. Olson says she couldn’t stop apologizing to a Hacks production that kept rearranging its schedule around an actor who wasn’t exactly the lead character. “Everyone over at Hacks was so incredibly flexible and kind and understanding,” she says. “This is a gigantic nuisance, and I’m a guest star on their show.”

Eventually, the first day on the Hacks set arrived, and she arrived on set at 5 a.m. for hair and makeup. Then, her phone rang. Her dad had lost consciousness. “Honestly, at this point, it’s a blur,” Olson says. “I collapsed in the line producer’s arms. I said, ‘I have to go.’ And he said, ‘Go.’”

Don, who had moved to a rehab center, had contracted pneumonia, slipped into a coma, and was in an ambulance headed to the emergency room. “Shutting down a production like that is devastating,” says Olson. “I’ll forever be grateful to them for their grace around that.”

Eventually, he stabilized. The doctors told her there would be no real recovery, and that his lungs would never again work on their own. But her parents encouraged her to go back to work. “I’m trying to digest that information and shoot a comedy,” she says. “I’d have to stop and take phone calls and wipe away tears and come back and then try and be funny. And it felt so weird. I felt guilty, because I was legitimately having fun. That was confusing.”

Downs describes Olson as “completely fearless,” and says for the episode she had to get into a pen with untrained goats. “When a goat would knock her over she would use it—she’d incorporate it into the scene seamlessly, never breaking character,” he says. “She is so committed to comedy she will do anything for the work, no matter how punishing or how insane and it’s a marvel to watch. She’s like a modern day Lucille Ball.”

Olson and Smart texted Don, a big fan of Hacks, videos from set throughout the shoot. “He especially loved me screaming at people—we’re just not yellers in real life,” she says. “So every scene I was doing, I was like, ‘Oh God, he is going to think this is so funny.’”

That episode of Hacks—which includes DJ refusing to accept failure in learning a clown routine—would end up being the last episode of anything Olson made that Don watched before he died. “And he loved it,” she says. “It’s just always going to be very special to me, because he got to see it.”