May 6, 2025
The beloved actress adds Variety’s Mary Tyler Moore Visionary Award to the six Emmys and two Golden Globes on her mantle
By Rosemary Rossi
Looking over Jean Smart’s oeuvre since her television debut in the 1979 TV movie “Before and After,” one thing is instantly noticeable — she has not stopped working. But over the last decade or so, momentum has picked up even more rapidly. It’s almost like producers and directors are shouting from the rooftops, “Get me Jean Smart!”
On May 7, the multi-award-winning “Hacks” actress will be presented with the second annual Mary Tyler Moore Visionary Award at the Variety FYC TV Fest for her groundbreaking achievements in storytelling and mirroring Moore’s impact on the entertainment industry. Although Smart jokes that the first thing she thought of when she heard of the honor was, “My boyfriend has always been madly in love with her,” her immediate reaction after that was, “My gosh!”
“[‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’] was something else,” she says. “It takes you to a time that we think of as sort of a Golden Age of the sitcoms, and she absolutely epitomized the joy that we all got from these shows, and particularly her shows.”
Moore’s husband, Dr. S. Robert Levine, Founder and CEO of the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative, a non-profit that advances research to preserve and restore vision in people with diabetes, will present Smart with the award.
Unlike the title of her hit Max series, Smart is anything but a hack, having earned every bit of her six Emmy wins (and seven additional nominations), two Golden Globes, three SAG Awards, plus a Grammy nomination and a Tony nomination. And with her upcoming return to Broadway for 12 weeks at Studio 54 in June in the one-woman show, “Call Me Izzy,” her future is just screaming “EGOT!”
“From your mouth to you-know-where,” she says with a laugh.
Although she has been graced with a career that has kept her very busy for more than four decades, the last 10-15 years are particularly notable not just for the quantity of projects, but also the variety of genres showcased in the likes of “Fargo,” “Watchmen,” “Mare of Easttown,” “Babylon” and, of course, “Hacks,“ which has been the gift that keeps on giving.
“I never thought I’d be so happy to be called a hack,” she said earlier this year while accepting her second Golden Globe playing legendary stand-up comedian Deborah Vance, a role she knew she wanted to play immediately after reading the pilot script. “It was all right there. The comedy was obvious, but you could see beyond that, behind her defenses and her darker moments.”
Deborah makes no bones about it, she is a woman who takes charge of her own life — and frequently the life of those in her orbit. “Well, yeah, she is a bit of a control freak,” Smart laughs. “But she’s also — she’s just so lonely. It’s so sad how lonely she is, and she doesn’t even really realize it, and then she doesn’t have to be living that way, you know? But she is kind of fueled by her bitterness and anger. But at the same time, her saving grace is that she sees humor in everything, which is, I guess, the one thing I feel like I have in common with her. I try to do the same.”
When looking over her entire body of work — which is plentiful! — it is abundantly clear that she knows how to choose her roles. You might even say that she’s smart about it. (See what we did there?)
“To be able to choose a role, for an actor, is very rare, and I know how exceptionally fortunate I am to be able to try to be choosy,” she says. “I try to look for something that maybe I haven’t kind of really done before. ‘Fargo’ was one of those projects that I just was so thrilled [about]. I actually had to audition for that. I was thrilled when [creator] Noah [Hawley] offered me that after the audition. Luckily, I don’t haven’t had to do that since.”
Smart says that her “Fargo” role as Floyd Gerhardt, the matriarch and head of the Gerhardt crime family, was a character that she felt like she understood. “I knew that from the outside she appeared to be so many things that weren’t really what she truly was,” she says. “And I had this whole backstory of about her, her childhood and why she was named Floyd … So I had come up with this whole thing about how she’d been ‘the son’ that her father never had but that he wished he’d had, so she did everything with her dad. You know, she hunted, she fished, she was a rancher. She rode horses. She worked hard. He was determined to have a son named Floyd, and he never got a son. So, by God, he still named her Floyd.”
Floyd was just one in a string of many very distinct characters Smart has portrayed. At one point in 2021, she was featured in three shows at the same time in wildly different genres: “Hacks,” “Mare of Easttown” and the animated series “Big Mouth.” And that type of scheduling luck is when it becomes really apparent to those watching and listening to her just how good she is.
“I’m grateful, and I’m not gonna question it. I mean, obviously, if this had all come 20 years ago, that would’ve been nice. But better late than never,” she jokes. “I mean, I think that it would be terrible to really hit it when you’re like 35 or 30, and then people just stop calling and it just goes down, down, down, down, down. So it’s been a very steady sort of upward trajectory, which I am just so incredibly grateful. I can’t explain it because I don’t feel like I’m any different as an actor than I was 20 years ago.”
“Hacks” hasn’t officially been picked up yet for a fifth season — “I’d be kinda surprised if we didn’t” — but Smart has her summer hiatus book for another gig: a return to Broadway at Studio 54 in “Call Me Izzy,” a dark comedy about a rural Louisiana woman. It was sent to her a couple years ago, and she absolutely fell in love with it. But trying to find a time when she could do it was a little tricky.
“Doing a play in New York, it’s a big-time commitment. And it’s a big ask for my kids to come with me and the only time I could really do it was during a summer break, because my youngest is still in school. So it finally worked out this summer,” says Smart. “I can’t wait for people to see it. I just think it’s extraordinary. The writing is so gorgeous. Some of it is so fun and quirky and whimsical, and some of it is tragic. It’s this woman who got married at 17 in rural Louisiana, lives in a trailer park with her husband, and she writes extraordinary poetry. But she has to hide it from him because he’s very abusive and he hates that part of her. … Sometimes you see things like that in marriage, where one person hides their light from the other because it bothers the other spouse, and that’s not really love.”
The show is just her and the audience for a solid hour.
“I’m so excited — and I’m a mildly terrified. Uh, more than mildly,” she laughs. “I just adore this character so much, but it’s 75 pages of just me talking. The longest speech I’ve ever done on stage was 15 pages and a half pages, and I thought that was scary. This is five times that.”
