‘Hacks’ Star Mark Indelicato on Damien & Deborah’s Wild Night Out at the Club

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Hacks Season 4, Episode 4, “I Love LA.”]

Hacks‘ latest episode, “I Love LA,” led Deborah (Jean Smart) and her right-hand man Damien (Mark Indelicato) to the club for an eventful night out in celebration of her late-night show’s premiere.

While Deborah waited for the evening broadcast of her first episode taping, she attended dinner to enjoy it alongside colleagues like Winnie (Helen Hunt) and musical guest Randy Newman, but after she was stood up, she turned to Damien for company. The young man was quite obviously nervous sharing the table with his boss, but as the conversation progressed, he revealed his own hardships about acclimating to Los Angeles and suggested that if Deborah accompanied him to the club would do wonders for his social life.

And so, Deborah joined Damien at the club and had such a good time that she stayed long after he’d left. Her fun was abruptly ended, though, when one over-enthusiastic clubgoer pushed poppers on her. Ultimately, Deborah passed out and hit her head on the go-go cage she had been in, sending her to the hospital.

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At the hospital, Deborah’s head writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), was called as her emergency contact, which forced the squabbling duo to watch their premiere episode together in the ER waiting room, where the only working TV was located. Below, Indelicato opens up about capturing Deborah and Damien’s dynamic, what went into filming those club scenes, and so much more.

In Episode 4, Damien takes on the responsibility of accompanying Deborah for a dinner celebrating her late-night premiere. How has it been picking up the duties Marcus left behind?

Mark Indelicato: This is gonna sound so trite, but I didn’t really think about it that much moving into Season 4 because I just implicitly trust our writers to do right by all of us. Whatever is on the page, there’s never been a moment where I’ve been like, “I don’t know about this.” It’s always been just implicit trust. And so, moving into this season, and having the moments that I was able to have with Deborah were just so incredible and so much fun. I really try to approach Damien with a sense of levity, even though he is so wound up all the time. But the words that come out of his mouth that are written on that page are so funny that I don’t really have to do that much work, to be honest.

When Deborah calls to have Damien join her for dinner, he shows up sweating, he’s so stressed. Why is he so nervous?

When we left Damien in Season 3, he was crying on the floor, telling Marcus that he doesn’t want to be close to Deborah, that he likes this distance that he has. So being summoned to spend intimate time with her outside of work is foreign to him and he had expressed that it’s not something that he is particularly interested in doing. The way that I approached Damien is that he cares about doing a good job at his job. He has a great work ethic, but that doesn’t particularly mean that he wants to be friends with Deborah.

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He’s not a fan of Deborah’s. In Season 2, he said something along the lines of “I don’t like comedy.” So he’s obviously not a fan, and I feel like, from Season 2 to 3 to now to that dinner scene, they’ve given the audience some kind of Easter eggs as to why he’s so uncomfortable. He doesn’t like comedy. He can’t relate to her and doesn’t want to, but he’s at work, so he has no choice but to go to the dinner.

As much as Damien might not be a fan, he knows others are, and he uses that to his advantage by inviting Deborah to a club. How was it filming those scenes?

It’s so silly. I’m so glad that it happened this season because all of us have spent four years together. I don’t know that I would have been as comfortable just dancing with Jean [in Season 1], you know? She’s a formidable force. I admire her and respect her so much that I wouldn’t have felt as comfortable in Season 1 or 2, but now we’re all just good friends. We just get to go to work with our friends, and I feel like, when we get to go and dance, it’s just like hanging out with one of your best friends. I wasn’t acting like I was genuinely having a good time.

She’s having a good time, but little does Deborah know the night isn’t going to end well for her…

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One of the things that I really got a kick out of was hearing, our first AD, Jeff Rosenberg [say], “Okay, now Jean, we’re gonna take you to the cage to do the poppers thing.” It’s like, what do you mean? This is amazing, Jean being escorted to a go-go cage to fake passing out on poppers. Hilarious! It’s such a good scene, and Jean is having a great time in those club scenes. She’s vibing, and the stamina on that woman is staggering. By the end of that, I was exhausted. She was still going. I was like, “Okay, girl, go off.”

Do you think Damien would feel any sense of guilt for Deborah’s popper predicament?

I don’t think he necessarily would feel responsible because of the conversation that they had when she was like, “Just go,” because he was like, “I’ll walk you to your car, we’ll leave because I’m leaving, but I wanna make sure that you’re situated,” and she relinquished any responsibility from him. So I don’t know that he would feel particularly responsible.

Hacks, Season 4, Thursdays, 9/8c, Max