So I’m not experienced in this area. Neither was Bill Hader, but he created a very compelling hitman. And then he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a show about it.
Bill is not of this planet. No one has his range of comedy and drama, and to promote the upcoming second season of his show, “Barry”, the New Yorker posted an article this week about him. Here are a few highlights:
On SNL:
Though Hader loved the show’s camaraderie, he dreaded the live performances, the rage and shame he knew he’d feel if he screwed up. He got frequent migraines, had a panic attack while playing Julian Assange, and developed a swollen left retina that required repeated anti-inflammatory injections, a problem he attributed to stress. A few years in, he began deliberately “blowing” his first line of dialogue. If the script read “Hi, honey, I’m home,” he’d say, “Honey? Honey? I’m home!” He said, “That would relax me, realizing, after my brain panicked, that no one even noticed.” Still, he said, “it was embarrassing how unhappy I was. I’d wake up Saturday morning crying, be hitting my head in the shower—I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. The irony was that I was being rewarded for it, so I had to keep doing it.”
On Post SNL, and being regarded as a performer, not an actor:
Hader said, “I couldn’t even get an audition for a Kenneth Lonergan movie. So I started doing table reads for casting directors.” At one (for a film that never got made), he found himself reading a handful of roles alongside Greta Gerwig, Kate Winslet, Bradley Cooper, and Paul Dano. Afterward, the casting director, Avy Kaufman, recommended him for another film she was working on, “The Skeleton Twins.” She told its writer-director, Craig Johnson, that she’d been hesitant—“Bill Hader? Of ‘S.N.L.’?”—but that he’d proved to be the most powerful actor at the table.
He’s a very humble man:
When he had dinner recently with the writers Tobias Wolff and George Saunders, whom he greatly admires, he said, “I was so nervous I don’t think I ever stopped talking, sabotaging myself by flooding the conversation.” (Saunders recalled it differently: “I woke up that night thinking I was having a heart attack, but it was only a back cramp, caused by having laughed so much at dinner.”)
On achieving balance/happiness:
“I try to remember that all this ends, so just be happy. Del Close”—the father of modern improv—“would tell the story of the skydiver whose parachute didn’t open after he jumped out of the plane, and he just kept dancing and doing flips and acrobatics and entertaining people as he fell to the earth. I was incredibly moved by that.” His eyes shone. “Because we’re all falling to the earth, so what else are you going to do?”
You can read the entire article here.
