Shot at fame:
Hit man turns to acting in the new comedy series Barry.
Bill Hader has played hundreds of characters during his eight-year run on Saturday Night Live. Now he is hoping audiences will respond to his new character, Barry, in the comedy series of that name. Written, directed and produced by the 39-year-old comedian, the six-episode show stars Hader in the title role as a hitman living in the Midwest, who is lonely and dissatisfied with his life. When he reluctantly goes to Los Angeles to kill an aspiring actor involved with a mobster’s wife, he ends up in his potential victim’s acting class and begins to imagine a new life as an actor. Hader, who also appeared in the films Trainwreck and
The Skeleton Twins, talks to Jenny Cooney Carrillo about his new project.
How did you come up with the idea for Barry?
Bill Hader: I had suggested the character be a hitman but Alec (Berg, co-creator) hated the idea of a guy who was so cool. But then we decided we’d take him to an acting class. It suddenly felt like a great idea. Here is a hitman who lives in the shadows but really wants to be in the spotlight. That’s when we knew we had something interesting.
How does acting class help Barry?
Acting classes are kind of like group therapy and so it’s about him being surrounded by these people understanding things about themselves and we thought that was a great starting point for him to realise, ‘I kill people and what does that do to my soul? Maybe that’s why I’m depressed.’ It’s about him finding his humanity.
How did working on Saturday Night Live help to prepare you for your own show?
I was never good at just writing jokes for Saturday Night Live. I always enjoyed thinking of a situation that was real and finding the humour in it somewhere. So it really helped for this character because it’s about playing him straight and seeing how funny that can be, muddling him up with all these insane things that happen.
So did you meet any hit men to research the role?
No, but I talked to Marines about their training because Barry is someone who was a Marine and came back very lost with only this skill to kill people. It was interesting to hear from these Marines. One guy from their unit became a dancer and another became a chess champion. They were all looking for meaning when they got back.
Did you get inspiration from your own acting classes? I have never taken an acting class – if you can’t tell from my performance (laughs). I took improv classes but never a traditional acting class so Alec and I had to go and sit in on acting classes to see people do scene work so we knew what that was like. One scene in our show, where the acting teacher yells at a woman in his class, we saw (there). The woman was crying as he was berating her and then he said, ‘Now go do the scene’ and she hugged him for motivating her after the scene. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve been acting for 10 years and nobody has ever yelled at me to get me to perform better.
So how did you get into acting? I didn’t really consider acting my calling until the age-old story that I was in high school and my girlfriend was in a play so I tried out for Glass Menagerie.I ended up in this Tennessee Williams play with her and was terrified with stage fright. But, after, my dad came up and said I was amazing. He was so genuine with the best review of my life to this day, I began searching for that feeling again and again and here we are.
But Barry is not a good actor, so do you have to be a good actor to play a bad actor? I watched a lot of true-crime shows and the re-enactments in true-crime shows are very stiff acting with people not listening to each other and one says, ‘The relationship was really bad’ and the other one saying ‘Dinner’s not ready yet!’ You can just tell they are saying their lines because they memorised them and I tried to put a little of that into Barry’s performances.