‘Hacks’ Co-Creators on How They Balance Their Romantic Relationship With Creative Pursuits

Lucia Aniello doesn’t remember exactly what Paul W. Downs did more than a decade ago in an improv class that made her laugh so hard, but her instinct was to record it. “I turned to our teacher and said, ‘Write that down,’ ” she says with a laugh as she recounts the story. “What an unbelievably rude thing for a student to say to a teacher, as if she were a writer’s assistant!”

The couple, who co-created HBO Max’s Hacks with Jen Statsky and are nominated for Emmys (along with Statsky, Aniello and Downs are up for writing for a comedy series; Aniello also is nominated for directing), have been making each other laugh since they met in their level one improv class at Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in 2007. “I remember walking into class, super early and ready to go, thinking, ‘How do I get on a mainstage team? I must be on a marquee show tomorrow,’ ” Downs recalls. “And Lucia came in five minutes late, like, ‘What’s goin’ on?’ — so not nervous, so nonplussed. I was like, ‘Who is this girl?’ ”

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The pair continued to take improv classes together (and began dating), coming up through the UCB ranks at the same time as Broad City‘s Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson ­(both later would serve as writers on the Comedy Central show on which Downs also appeared as Abbi’s fitness instructor boss, Trey). At the time, internet videos were becoming extremely popular. “It was the height of The Lonely Island’s digital shorts on SNL,” Downs says. “Lucia said, ‘It’s great to be doing a show for 100 people in a basement at UCB, but we should be making videos and releasing them.’ ” A creative and romantic partnership was born, and the pair created countless short films and videos in a very DIY fashion. “We were all making stuff,” Downs says of the creative environment that circled around the famed New York improv theater. “My parents were entrepreneurs,” Aniello adds, “so doing it myself was always attractive to me.”

With that entrepreneurial spirit in mind, the pair have split the duties in their partnership — both are directors, writers and performers and have at times done all three at once. They are co-showrunners on Hacks, and both have directed episodes of the show. Downs also appears as the agent to Jean Smart’s Deborah and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava. “People see us as me being the director, he’s the actor,” Aniello says. “But we don’t see things quite set in stone. It’s easy to assign those labels, but we see it all — whether it’s writing, acting, producing, directing — as part of a whole. It’s fluid, and we can easily switch roles, and that’d be normal for us.”

All of that is in service of the ultimate goal, which is to keep making things — and make each other laugh. “We still feel the same excitement now as we did when we were starting out,” Aniello says. “It’s a little less sweaty — we’re not carrying our own equipment anymore. Our budget may be bigger, but it’s all the same feeling of excitement.”

This story first appeared in the Aug. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.