Bill Hader Reveals Why Your Favorite Directors Can’t Stand Him
Barry and Saturday Night Live star Bill Hader is pretty sure a lot of the best directors in the world hate him. Here's why.
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Bill Hader seems like a pretty chill guy, considering he is most famous for playing a barely-holding-it-together hitman turned actor on HBO’s Barry and an arch, giggling nightlife expert as Saturday Night Live’s Stefon. It is thus pretty surprising that according to a recent profile in The Hollywood Reporter, Hader has the distinct sense he has alienated some of the biggest directors in show business. In the profile, Hader says he had a tendency in his Saturday Night Live years to corner famous guest hosts and pepper them with questions about the minutiae of his work, and that specifically Martin Scorsese put out a pretty strong vibe about it. Here’s how Hader put it:
I don’t know what I said, but I just felt the vibe from him was, ‘Please get out of my dressing room.’ It could just be in my head, but I just felt like he could smell, ‘Oh, you’re a film nerd.
The star of The Skeleton Twins goes on to say that he pretty much had the same experience with Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, so it probably just wasn’t that Scorsese was having a bad day. The profile also has a quote from friend and frequent collaborator John Mulaney that Hader is a film obsessive, so we could also see him having a lot of questions. On the other hand, the same profile has Bill Hader discussing his intense, lifelong struggles with anxiety, so it could be that the director of Bringing Out the Dead wasn’t as upset with him as he might have thought. Reportedly, those same issues with anxiety were a serious issue for his years with Saturday Night Live, with consistent panic attacks and vomiting only moments before he had to get geared up as Vincent Price.
Currently, Bill Hader is on the press circuit for the upcoming third season of his hit HBO comedy-drama show Barry. Created by Hader and Alec Berg (who has written for Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Silicon Valley), the show follows the titular Barry Berkman, a socially awkward and depressed hitman. Upon arriving in Los Angeles to perform a contract killing for the Chechen mob, he stumbles into the world of off-off-off-off-off-Broadway theater and actually manages to find human connection in the acting community. Supported by a killer supporting ensemble cast including greats like Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan, and Henry Winkler, Barry tries to find a new life and career as an actor. But well, things don’t go all that well and a lot of people keep getting murdered. It’s pretty great. Here’s the teaser trailer for the third season:
Reportedly, the fourth season of Barry is already in the works. The same Hollywood Reporter profile indicates that it is being outlined and currently written, and that Bill Hader plans to completely assume directing responsibilities for that season. It is an ambitious goal to co-write, produce, direct, and star in a show, but for all his anxiety, it seems that Hader has an easier time with that than not eating an entire Entenmann’s coffeecake at 2 A.M. in the store (which he has done). Barry currently has a staggering 99% Critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and by all reports, the third season will be keeping the streak alive. The third season of Barry will premiere on HBO Max on April 24.
