J. Smith-Cameron unpacks that emotional showdown with Jean Smart on “Hacks” (Exclusive)

The "Succession" Emmy nominee plays Kathy, the estranged sister of Smart's Deborah Vance: They have to "slap each other or hug," she tells EW.

Whether you consider it kismet or pure coincidence, one thing is undeniable: The stars quite literally aligned for J. Smith-Cameron to play Jean Smart's younger, estranged sister on season 3 of Hacks.

Jean also just so happens to be the real name of the Succession alum, who started going by J. in college. And the similarities don't end there.

"I started out life as a brunette, but as I started to go gray, I just covered it more with highlights and [went] blonde," she explains in an exclusive interview with Entertainment Weekly, laughing. "And I have big-lidded eyes that are blue, and we somehow morphed into looking like sisters... We do have some features that look like we could be actually related, which is pretty, I think, fortuitous."

Related: Guest stars galore on Hacks: Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder preview Tony Goldwyn and Christina Hendricks' roles

How the Emmy and Tony nominee landed the role was also completely by chance. At an HBO after-party, Hacks creators and showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky were able to share their love of Succession with Smith-Cameron, who in turn expressed her love of their Max comedy series. So the trio seized the opportunity, asking if she'd be open to playing Kathy. "We've thought of her for a long time as the part," Downs tells EW, "and we were lucky that she said yes because she's so talented."

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But Smith-Cameron admits to not being sure the offer was real.

"I'm so trained to take anything that happens at a party late at night was a grain of salt. I was like, okay, don't let yourself daydream about this. Wait till your agent or manager hears anything of this," she recalls. "And I didn't right away. So I was like, okay, well, everyone was tipsy and everyone was being appreciative of each other, and I'm just not going to hold my breath."

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She didn't have to wait too long. When the call came, she was ready.

Kathy first popped up at the end of episode 6, when she unexpectedly received an invitation to Deborah's annual "Christmas Spectacular." Kathy accepts and nervously shows up in episode 7, gift in hand. As anxiety continues to build (Deborah even excuses herself to go vomit) and tensions mount (Kathy and Deborah's pregnant daughter, DJ, talk frequently and are quite close, it turns out — and then, Kathy damages the to-scale gingerbread creation of Deborah's mansion), the two eventual have the conversation they've been dreading, about Kathy stealing Deborah's husband, Frank, decades earlier, creating a permanent rift in their relationship.

A fan of the series, she had some preconceived notions about Kathy, albeit ones derived purely from hearing just one side of the story, Deborah's. "I had several theoretical feelings about Kathy: a) She could have been extremely jealous of her sister being the show-business star and the beauty and being the original wife of someone that she obviously then fell in love with," Smith-Cameron explains. She also wondered if Kathy was equally, or even more, malicious as Deborah. But on the flip side, she wondered if Kathy was actually nice and was always in Deborah's corner. "I thought to myself, that is the really human real thing that would happen. Truth is always more interesting than whatever you can make up."

Related: Inside Deborah Vance's 'Hacks' roast — and DJ's catchphrase: 'What a c--t!'

Once she got the script, she couldn't wait to find out which, if any of those things, would be the reality. "I read it like a Christmas tree on fire, really fast," she says, laughing. "I think it's really well crafted that they had them get together at Christmas. Those big holidays are notorious for painful family scenes to occur."

Things get especially painful for Deborah and Kathy as they rehash their falling out — sitting outside Deborah's house, a snow machine further accentuating their icy relationship. How did the affair start? Why did Kathy betray her in such a way? Deborah prioritizing her career over family didn't help.

"Deborah's got this credo that reminds me of my character in Succession a little bit," Smith-Cameron says of Gerri, Waystar RoyCo's general counsel, on the Emmy-winning HBO drama. "How does it better my position? Everything has to pass the test of: Is it any good for me? And if it means betraying people that work for her or her family, so be it."

But in the end, worse than Deborah losing her husband, she tearfully explains, was losing her sister.

"In that circumstance and they're face to face, they've got to either slap each other or hug each other," she says of the tense moment of reckoning. "Jean is just a wonderful actress, and I think we're both authentically overcome emotionally in that moment. It's such a pleasure to work with someone like her. She gives a very full performance and lots to react to."

Instead of a slap or hug, they have a brief snowball fight (Kathy started it!) that results in Deborah hurting Kathy's eyes with a handful of the fake powder's "six-sided crystals." After coming together to tend to her temporary injury, they leave things in a cautiously hopeful place.

"Kathy, I believe, has gone off really hoping that that snowball fight and crying in front of each other has cleared the way for intimacy. And so her expectations are in one place of what the next meeting will be like," she says, teasing Kathy's return in the season finale (May 30). "Kathy's expectations were like, we've fought and we got through that and now maybe we'll start over and we'll be friends and we'll have lunch and we'll spend a whole weekend together and we'll bond."

But, in typical Deborah fashion, career supersedes family, and in the episode, Kathy "really stands up for herself."

Related: Jean Smart reveals Hacks Salem witch trial joke based on her own Wiccan genealogy

Easier to do, Smith-Cameron admits, with Deborah Vance than Logan Roy. "The way he runs his business, it affects everyone in the most destructive way, and he really doesn't care, and he wants to affect people in a global way," she says, contemplating who's a scarier character. "I think Deborah just wants to be a successful performer. She's not trying to take over the world. But she's pretty fricking formidable."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.