Here’s why Hannah Einbinder, a third-generation Angeleno, is an Eagles fan

Hannah Einbinder, the stand-up comedian and actor, who just won an Emmy for her role as comedy writer Ava Daniels in the TV show Hacks, is the kind of Eagles fan who drunkenly wept on the streets in front of news cameras when the team won the Super Bowl in 2018.

No, this wasn’t on Broad Street. No, she didn’t grow up in Philly, and no, she doesn’t live here now.

But at Sunday night’s Emmy ceremony, golden statuette in hand and time running out, Einbinder stayed true to her roots.

“Go Birds, f— ICE, and free Palestine!” she said before leaving the stage, wearing a red pin demanding a ceasefire on Gaza.

Einbinder, who is Jewish, recently signed onto a pledge with thousands of film workers vowing not to screen films, appear at, or work with Israeli film institutions that they see as “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

But how did she come to say “Go Birds” on such an occasion? Einbinder, whose representatives did not respond to requests for comment, grew up on the West Side of Los Angeles. A third-generation Angeleno, she’s the daughter of original Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman and actor and writer Chad Einbinder.

The fandom is something of an inheritance: Her dad was born in Doylestown. (In classic Doylestown fashion, he seems to have told his children he was from Philly).

“My dad’s from Philly, and he brainwashed me,” Einbinder said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last year. “He brainwashed me very young, so we’re Eagles fans.”

There’s a good amount of footage to prove it.

In 2018, Einbinder and her dad were at a Philly sports bar in Santa Monica when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Ecstatic and very inebriated, they left to celebrate and in Einbinder’s telling, “unfortunately, or fortunately, KTLA5 News was on the scene. And they did, in many ways, capture us drunk in the streets.”

Colbert proceeded to show the news clip, which featured Einbinder “either on the edge of tears or completely engulfed in tears,” as he put it.

Wearing a Donovan McNabb jersey and clutching the newscaster’s microphone, Einbinder made an impassioned speech to the people of L.A. The chyron read “Hannah Einbinder, Eagles fan.”

“Philadelphia teams have had to deal with loss, with disappointment, with anguish, with pain, for so many years,” she said. “I thank the good lord for blessing us and blessing the Eagles and for winning this game.”

Her dad, wearing a jersey with his own last name on the back “because I’ll never be traded,” chimed in, “All our family is back in Philly. Uncle Eddie — ”

“We did it,” Einbinder says.

Then the two did an Eagles chant, together, on a Santa Monica boulevard.

As she’s become more famous, Einbinder has shared her love for the Eagles more widely.

At a red carpet interview in March, when pressed to cast Eagles players in Hacks, Einbinder said she would cast Saquon Barkley as her love interest, “with all respect to his beautiful family.”

And in August, she appeared on Kylie Kelce’s podcast Not Gonna Lie, wearing a kelly green Eagles varsity jacket. Kelce asked whether she’d ever done an interview without saying “Go Birds.”

“No,” Einbinder said. “I think ‘Go Birds’ is obviously a tool that we know can mean a million different things. Congratulations, you just had a baby, Go Birds. Hello, goodbye. I’m sorry for your loss, in some cases.”

She has said that beyond her family’s love for the team, the fandom was a way for her dad to be close to his dad, and it’s a way for her to be close to her own dad.

“I love the Eagles and I love football, but I love my dad,” she told the Hollywood Reporter last year. “It’s a big point of connection to him.”