While reading your post I assumed @array can be of varying length, so there maybe a need for such a provision to be held. In addition to the informative replies you received, I thought I would just demonstrate this in an example which shows the possibility of array manipulations on @array while it is in $hashref... this is just an example:

use Data::Dumper;
my @array = ('test', 'demo', 'work');

my $hashref = {'key'=>['value', [@array], 'add']};

push @{$hashref->{'key'}->[1]}, 'home';
push @{$hashref->{'key'}->[1]}, 'cars';

printf "I popped \'%s\'.\n\n", pop @{$hashref->{'key'}->[1]};
print Dumper(\%$hashref);
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