Paul W. Downs Reveals The Hilarious Way Cher Turned Down A Cameo Appearance On ‘Hacks'

Yahoo

6 days ago

Despite the Hacks creative team's best efforts, it seems Cher did not, ahem, believe in the need for her cameo role on the HBO Max comedic satire.
Earlier this week, co-creator Paul W. Downs appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live to discuss the fourth season of the Emmy-winning Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder vehicle, which is coming to its season finale on Thursday. As the show finds itself in the world of late-night comedy, Downs along with co-creators Lucia Aniello (to whom Downs is married) and Jen Statsky were able to convince many a famous person to cameo as themselves — Kimmel among them — but there have definitely been some rejections, though perhaps none as brutally honest and funny as from Cher.
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'Oh, yeah,' Downs replied when asked by the host if anyone had declined an appearance. 'Well, one person in particular we asked to be on the show Seasons 1, 2 and 4 — and that person is Cher.'
The Broad City alum went on to explain that Cher's manager advised the team to write in the Grammy-winning singer's ice cream brand Cherlato (a portmanteau of Cher and gelato) into the show, and as a result, the musician would 'probably' agree to the role.
'So we wrote a commercial for Cherlato,' Downs explained to audience laughs. 'Deborah [Smart] was gonna go to the Cherlato factory, she was gonna taste all the Cherlato, she was gonna love the Cherlato, and then when it came down to shoot, we got a pass.'
He continued, 'Now, people usually say, 'I love the show, but respectfully, I don't have time.' Once, Javier Bardem said, 'I cannot say yes right now,' which is Spanish for 'no.' And so we said, 'Is there any feedback? Can we change the script?' And her manager said, 'Well, this is the quote from Cher: I don't want to do it.''
'Well, at least she's honest,' Kimmel said amid laughs.
Later on in the interview, the two discussed Kimmel's brief appearance in Season 4, with Downs affirming that 'we would love more of you on the show,' to which the host replied, 'I don't believe that, is that true? Well, no one's called. I mean, I have a gelato coming out, I'd love you to…'
Downs even brought some outtakes of Kimmel's scenes, in which he got up-close-and-personal with Smart's comedienne, unwittingly prompting the actress to momentarily break character.
As Hacks looks forward to its Season 4 conclusion, it'll pick up from the implosion of 'Late Night With Deborah Vance'; the penultimate episode saw Deborah forced into a moral and professional quandary, in which altruism prevailed as she revealed live on the air the censorship and forced firing of her head writer Ava (Einbinder), leading Tony Goldwyn's Bob Lipka to pull the plug on the hard-fought show — before dropping the bomb that Deborah's noncompete clause will oust her out of her livelihood for the next 18 months.
Watch the interview below:
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