Bill Hader Just Wants to Make Weird Things (2024)

The HBO show “Barry” centers on a former marine, played by Bill Hader, who has transitioned his field killing skills into a career as a hit man for hire in the grisly Los Angeles underworld. In the show’s pilot, which premièred in 2018, Barry stumbles into an amateur acting class taught by a pompous has-been (Henry Winkler). There, he finds both a purpose and a girlfriend (the striving Sally, played by Sarah Goldberg) and begins to feel that he might change his fate—until his assassin dispatcher, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root), draws him back into the killing business, and in doing so enmeshes Barry in the ruthless dealings of the Chechen mafia. In the course of four seasons—the series finale is May 28th—Barry maintains an outward gee-golly affect while becoming evermore monstrous within. He kills his acting teacher’s policewoman girlfriend just as she begins to unravel his criminal past. He kills an old Army buddy in a parked car and makes it look like a suicide. He massacres a crew of low-level mob lackeys inside a dingy warehouse. He tortures Fuches and verbally batters Sally. Have I mentioned that “Barry” is supposed to be a comedy? After a harrowing reveal in one recent episode, one viewer tweeted, “bill hader expect an invoice from my therapist.”

Hader, who is forty-four years old, spent eight years on “Saturday Night Live” doing spot-on impressions (of Alan Alda, Al Pacino, and Vincent Price, among others) and original eccentric characters such as the gadfly club promoter Stefon. Growing up in Oklahoma, he idolized independent filmmakers and classic screwball farces, and he never really intended to make a detour into sketch comedy. He moved to Los Angeles in 1999 to work as a production assistant in the movies with the goal of directing one day. He spent his entire twenties doing odd below-the-line jobs on film and television sets. Then, on a whim, in 2003, he joined a Second City improv class, and in less than two years had been cast on “S.N.L.” This career whiplash led to a period of severe imposter syndrome. In a 2019 profile, Hader told my colleague Tad Friend that he spent the majority of his time at “S.N.L.” believing that he was about to be fired. After leaving the show, in 2013, he starred in the rom-com “Trainwreck” and co-created the niche spoof show “Documentary Now!,” but it was not until creating “Barry,” alongside the veteran TV producer Alec Berg, that he felt that he was finally fulfilling his original dream. That his dream often looks, to viewers, like more of a nightmare, is part of the fun. You don’t expect the bleakest show on television to come from a guy who both looks and sounds like a mid-century milkman.

Hader spoke to me the other day, via Zoom, from his home in Los Angeles, about the final season of “Barry” and his winding trajectory toward making it. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

I was thinking of you recently, because I wrote a piece for the magazine about Preston Sturges, who I know is one of your heroes. I think you might be the world’s biggest Sturges fan.

I love Preston Sturges. Oh, my God—I wish more people knew who he was, and how much Preston Sturges is in so many of the movies that they love. I still go back to his stuff all the time.

We can come back to Preston, but let’s dive into “Barry.” Did you want to be through with it, personally? I know it’s a huge effort for you, as you are writing and directing and post-producing so many episodes.

Yes and no. Making this show has been by far the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done professionally. But then, on the other hand, doing Season 3 and 4 back-to-back, this was a real grind. I directed all the episodes. And then, for Season 3, we reshot a lot of it, and I directed those, so, reshoots, and I was constantly rewriting and stuff. The analogy I have is that I feel like in 2015 I started bouncing a ball on a tennis racquet. And then people started coming around and looking at me doing it. And I was, like, “Yeah. Oh, look at this.” And then it’s been six years of more and more people coming and watching me bounce this ball on a tennis racquet, and it just feels like more and more pressure to not drop it. Next Friday is my last day ever. We mix the final episode and then it’s, Turn in your badge, you’re done forever. And so I can finally put the racquet and the ball down and just be, like, “We’re good.” I’ve been in production mode now—pretty much just constantly since May of 2021. Someone pointed out to me that, from May, 2021, until, I guess, next Friday, I will have made the equivalent of four movies.

Did you have the ending planned out from the beginning?

Not necessarily. We were shooting a scene in Season 2, and during that scene I thought, Oh, I know how the series could end. But how we got there is not at all how I thought it would happen. It’s a cliché, and it sounds like a non-answer, but it’s true that the characters start dictating the thing. People say that they like this show and they like the writing and directing and acting and stuff, and it’s all very nice. But what they don’t see is the amount of things that went wrong, and things that we tried that didn’t work, and things we shot that then we lost. It’s a real process of honing it and honing it and honing it.

You were into movies from a very young age.

Very, very young. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t watching movies. I got more obsessive about it, I would say, around the age of ten, when I started noticing directors. I remember noticing Steven Spielberg and John Landis and John McTiernan. I remember going to see “Die Hard” and knowing, Oh, that’s the name at the end of “Predator.” With old movies, the experience I always talk about is watching “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” with my mom, when Charles Laughton swings down and saves the woman. She just was so moved by that shot. Watching her react to it was really powerful. That’s what movies can do. And so I got addicted to that. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had friends who liked movies and stuff, but no one to the degree that I did.

Was there an art-house cinema in Tulsa?

I later found out there is the Circle Cinema, but I don’t remember it from when I lived there. I do remember I was thirteen, and I hung out with a girl, and she wanted to go see “Father of the Bride.” This was 1991. And I was, like, “No, we’re going to go see ‘Barton Fink.’”

Great date movie... especially for eighth graders.

She was, like, “What the fuck is this?” But, yeah, I knew there was something obsessively lame about me when I fell asleep once in a video-store aisle. I took all these boxes down and was looking at the backs of them and reading them, and I was really tired. This poor video clerk was, like, “Hey, man, you got to put all these back.”

Did you have a plan for how you’d go about getting involved in the film industry?

No, zero. I read the William Goldman book and Robert Rodriguez’s book and was just, like, How do you get in there? How do you do it? I remember going to L.A. with my dad in 1998. We went to Hollywood. We did all the touristy things, and I just thought it was really amazing.

It’s interesting that you bring up “Barton Fink” because I’m, like, “That is a movie that, if I saw it in my youth, would make me never want to go to L.A.”

So many times, favorite movies are ones that you just saw at the right time. I also remember being at a sleepover when I was eleven, and my friend Tom’s older brother decided to fuck with us, and he showed us “A Clockwork Orange” and then “Taxi Driver.” I was really bowled over. And then I told my dad about it, and, instead of my dad being angry, he went, “Wow, those are really powerful movies!” And then a couple days later he was, like, “Wait, you should not have seen that.”

When I look back at my early scripts and short films, they were just pastiches of everything I liked. I still do that. I look at the end of Season 2 of “Barry” and I go, “Oh, yeah, it’s like ‘Taxi Driver.’ Jesus.” It’s ingrained in there. You don’t realize that maybe you’re doing it. I was just talking to Ari Aster about this, and he was, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m watching ‘Beau Is Afraid,’ and ‘Defending Your Life’ is one of my favorite movies, and it’s so obvious.” But you don’t consciously do it.

Bill Hader Just Wants to Make Weird Things (2024)
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