Kathryn Hahn Will Play Joan Rivers In A New Showtime Bio-Series

The “WandaVision” star is set to portray the comedy legend in "The Comeback Girl," but many feel the role should have gone to a Jewish actor.
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Kathryn Hahn didn’t emerge from Sunday’s Emmy Awards a winner, but she’s already lined up her next high-profile acting role.

The “WandaVision” actor has signed on to play Joan Rivers in “The Comeback Girl,” a new limited series produced by Showtime. As Variety reported Tuesday, the series will chronicle Rivers’s life in the mid-1980s after she was fired from Fox’s “The Late Show” and her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, died by suicide.

“Trailblazer. Adored. Cruel. Diva. Joan Rivers had a life like no other,” the show’s promotion reads, according to TVLine. The “awe-inspiring” series promises to show how its legendary subject “persevered through near suicide and professional abyss to rebuild herself and her career to become a global icon.”

Rivers died in 2014 at age 81.

“The Comeback Girl” will be directed by Greg Berlanti, whose credits include “Dawson’s Creek” and the 2018 gay teen comedy, “Love, Simon.” Berlanti, Hahn and screenwriter Cosmo Carlson are its executive producers.

Tuesday’s announcement drew a mixed response from fans.

“Bit of a rubbish day, but to find out that Kathryn Hahn is going to play Joan Rivers has just gone a long way to make up for it,” one person wrote. “Inject it into my veins.” Added another, “I am very much here for the Kathryn Hahn renaissance.”

Others, however, said they’d hoped to see Rivers, who often emphasized her Jewish identity in her comedy, played by a Jewish actor. The criticism had come up before when the role of Midge Maisel in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which was partly based on Rivers’s career, went to a non-Jewish actor.

Hahn, who was raised Catholic, previously played Rabbi Raquel Fein on “Transparent.”

Though it remains to be seen if she’ll reprise her Emmy-nominated role in a second season of “WandaVision,” the actor recently completed work on “Knives Out 2” and the Apple TV+ series “The Shrink Next Door.”

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