Bill Hader: riding the Trainwreck to fame

The rubber-faced SNL player stars with Amy Schumer in relationship comedy Trainwreck. By Nick Dent

Everyone is talking about Amy Schumer, and so they should. Her Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, covering topics from rape in sport to sexism on television, is brilliant. This month she is starring in her own screenplay, Trainwreck, directed by comedy great Judd Apatow ( Knocked Up). Schumer is an unashamedly hard-drinking and promiscuous men’s magazine journalist who reassesses her life after getting involved with a sports physician (Bill Hader). It’s a comedy drawing upon on her own experience. “I always like it when people go to a very personal, intimate place,” Apatow, who has previously only directed his own scripts, tells Time Out. “She’s a brilliant stand-up comedian who has a very important sketch show. I think it’s exciting that she’s having her moment.”

But also having his moment is her leading man, former Saturday Night Live regular Hader, 37. Hader is more familiar to audiences for his array of scene-stealing cameos in Apatow-produced films including Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Superbad, and This Is 40, as well as Men in Black 3 (as Andy Warhol) and 22 Jump Street (as ‘Culinary School Villain’). “When Judd initially gave me the script I thought he wanted me to play a supporting part,” Hader says. “And when I got my audition and it was for the male lead, I went, wait, what? Usually my forte is coming on for a kooky walk-on.”

“I think Bill has been typecast,” Apatow explains. “Because he’s been doing a lot of broad characters it’s not easy to think of him as a grounded person but there was a side to him I wanted to show people.”

Aaron Conners is an introverted sports doctor who is attracted to Schumer’s character’s confidence and lack of inhibition: “There’s something exciting about someone who’s so open and bluntly honest… [The real Amy] is very honest and very confident,” Hader says.

Hader’s path into comedy was circuitous. An Oklahoma native, he moved to LA in 1999 to pursue a career in filmmaking and poured his savings into a short film as a calling card, only to realise in the editing suite that it was “awful”. Looking for a change, he started taking classes at Second City LA, the famous school for improv and sketch comedy. “And that was the thing that took off. A year and a half later I was on Saturday Night Live, which is like going from preschool to Harvard.”

Trainwreck opens Thu Jul 30.

“Usually my forte is coming on for a kooky walk-on”