Jean Smart is having a moment, as they say. This has been branded “the goddamned summer of Jean Smart” by Uproxx. In Mare of Easttown, she stole every scene she was in. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say she brought it as well as Kate Winslet.) As the lead in HBO’s Max’s Hacks, she’s killing it. And it wasn’t long ago that she was nominated for an Emmy for her performance in Damon Lindelof’s TV adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. That’s all well and good, but she claims in a new interview that the job was originally intended for someone else.
Smart had a Variety interview with SNL’s Bowen Yang, in which they discussed their very different professions. Watchmen, in which she played the older version of Silk Spectre, the retired crime fighter-turned-fed, was mentioned by the once-sentient Titanic iceberg. Jean Smart wasn’t meant to be doing all of this.
“I was sort of shot from guns because they hired me two days before I started,” Smart told Yang. “I’ll be really honest: I had Sigourney Weaver to thank for turning down the role. So, thank you, Sigourney.”
Weaver would have been a greater name and a bigger presence in sci-fi, and she would have probably contributed a similar-but-different air of no-nonsense-ness and sadness to a heroine tormented by everything that has gone before. And, though imagining her in the part is entertaining, everything worked out in the end.
Smart was also introduced to a genre she had never worked in before. She admitted, “I knew nothing about the graphic novel.” “I had no idea what the story was about. When I first started reading the pilot, I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, this is incredible.” That Damon was able to exploit that horrible aspect of our history that almost no one knew about — that was what was so shocking, that I had never heard of the Tulsa massacre — that was what was so stunning. That’s why, when I asked him to undertake a second season, I believe he declined since he put everything into it.”
And where can you can watch Hacks, Mare of Easttown, and Watchmen? All on HBO Max. If, however, you want to go classic Jean Smart, you can find Designing Women on Hulu.
