Bill Hader doesn’t burst into the room like a steamroller, dropping one-liners and rattling off celebrity impressions as I’d half expected from a Saturday Night Live alum. He knocks. There he is, standing at the door of this West Hollywood hotel suite we reserved for a photoshoot, looking unassuming in a t-shirt, hoodie, and jeans. “Hi, I’m Bill,” he says, somewhat brusquely, as we shake hands. As he settles in and starts to relax, a sense of relief seems to come over him when he notices there isn’t a table of props waiting for him.

“Sometimes I’ll walk in [to a photo shoot] and find a rubber chicken,” he says softly, grateful that we haven’t come up with some scheme to trick him into putting on an intimate comedy show for us.

But Hader is also anxious, because he’s just days away from the Season Two premiere of the pitch-black comedy series Barry, on which he stars (and for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series) and co-created with writer and producer Alec Berg. He perks up when the photographer’s assistant tells him how much he loved the first season. He expresses his gratitude, but also offers a warning. “The second season is … dark,” he says. When I brag and say that I’ve already seen the (extremely funny) first three episodes, Hader quickly cautions: “It gets darker.”

(Later in our conversation, Hader makes his anxiousness about the new season a little more clear: “Going into Barry, I never want to feel like, ‘Yeah, I’m the star of the thing, and I co-created it, and it’s all on me if the show works or not.’”)

“The second season is … dark,” Hader warns about Barry. Julian Berman

I have to admit that I’m surprised that Hader, who spent eight seasons on SNL and appeared in Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Skeleton Twins, and Trainwreck, among others, is so stoic. Maybe it’s because he’s not jazzed about a photoshoot, or the groomer fussing with his hair, or the boots a stylist picked out for him when he could wear his own sneakers. Maybe he just feels a little out of place at the location, the two-story suite at the Palihouse in West Hollywood, a glamorous location a few blocks south of the Sunset Strip in a Los Angeles neighborhood full of mini castles and shiny, beautiful people. (When we move to the open-air courtyard that houses the hotel restaurant, where we have lunch and talk after the shoot, Hader squints as he takes in the luxe interior and says, bemused, “What is this place?”) Or maybe this is just who Bill Hader is—not the clown you’d expect, but a serious artist who is finally able to express how he really sees himself.

Despite what Hader might tell you, the premise of his TV show is very funny. A former Marine turned killer for hire, Hader’s Barry Berkman lands in Los Angeles to take out his latest target: Ryan Madison, a personal trainer who’s fooling around with the wife of a Chechen mob boss. After stalking him around the Valley, Barry follows Ryan into an acting class—led by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler, who also picked up an Emmy for his performance last year). Although he doesn’t end up killing Ryan as instructed (one of the Chechens beats him to it), he can’t help but return to Cousineau’s class as a hopeful performer. More curious about the ways his classmates express themselves as actors, Barry learns that to be a good performer requires delving deep into one’s psyche to pull out often unsettling emotions—something he’s gotten used to avoiding in his life as a veteran.

The bullets fly and bodies drop in Barry; while the violence is sometimes used for comedic effect, it’s too banal to be badass. Julian Berman

Barry’s first season sees the title character wrestling with his own demons and past traumas, which serve as obstacles in his quest to lead a satisfying life. He’s also trying to leave his violent past behind him, a difficult task as his family friend turned hitman handler Fuches (Stephen Root) keeps enlisting him for more gigs, and an overly friendly and optimistic member of the Chechen crime family named NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) fashions himself as Barry’s best friend. As the Chechen stronghold over Los Angeles builds up—meaning more jobs for Barry—so does his interest in Cousineau’s acting class, where Barry finds camaraderie in his fellow would-be actors and a love interest in Sally (Sarah Goldberg).

An HBO half-hour comedy about a hitman, led by a former SNL cast member and co-created by a Seinfeld and Silicon Valley writer, would allow any potential Barry fan to jump to conclusions. “I think people were like, Here we go. I know what that’s going to be,” Hader says. The show does, in fact, defy those expectations. While there’s an inherent goofiness to the premise—and to Hader’s personality, even if he’s more low-key in person than most comic actors—the first season unfolds with some extremely heavy moments. The bullets fly and bodies drop; while the violence is sometimes used for comedic effect, it’s too banal to be badass.

“I’m not a violent person,” Hader says. “I don’t like violence. People always ask, ‘What’s it like getting to work with a gun?’ I don’t like it.” Julian Berman

There are, to Hader’s point, times when Barry gets very dark, almost unsettlingly so. Take, for example, the scene in the penultimate episode of the first season, in which Barry kills his distraught friend who threatens to tell the cops after a deal goes wrong and their fellow veterans are slaughtered. It’s brutal and alarming, even if the murder is shot from the exterior of a car—we only hear the gun blast and see a flash of blood on the windshield. But we know how affecting the killing is, and how it’s unlike any other murder Barry has committed so far in his life, because of what happens next: Barry shows up to a class performance to offer a single line of dialogue to Sally’s Macbeth. For the first time, Barry’s delivery is full of emotion—anger, fear, grief, regret—that it knocks everyone (including us) off their feet.

It’s a dynamic turning point for the comedy series, one that Hader himself admits was what Barry was working toward. Barry has a cathartic, yet demoralizing, revelation that he is a violent man—something he was always able to rationalize and compartmentalize in his chosen profession. But the first season finale goes even further with Barry’s struggle; when the LAPD detective investigating Ryan's murder, who later becomes Cousineau’s girlfriend, figures out Barry's profession, he has to act. Does he throw up his hands and turn himself in, or does he continue to keep his own interests in mind—even if that means another innocent person has to die?

The season ends with Moss’s murder, and thus Hader and Berg set up some incredible stakes for Barry’s second season—and their own writing. The New York Times critic James Poniewozik even wrote that the final episode was so good that Barry should effectively be cancelled. Luckily for Hader (and us), it wasn’t. And its second season is just as funny, sharp, and, yes, dark as its first.

There are plenty of similarities between Hader and Barry that a lazy person would be quick to make. They both effectively landed in Los Angeles after years in the Midwest—Hader grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Barry moves from Cleveland. Hader has been pretty open about his aimlessness as a young adult, from being a mediocre student to a timid stage performer who somehow managed to get a spot in one of the most important American comedy institutions. (His origin story is wild: He was spotted at a Second City show in Los Angeles by Megan Mullally, who called Lorne Michaels and recommended Hader for SNL.) And yet, he also admits to having felt like a misfit even during his time on the sketch series. Calling back to a scene in the pilot that sees Barry sheepishly hanging out with his new cohort after acting class, Hader says: “I know what that feels like. That was me at SNL in my first season. I so badly wanted to be a part of it.”

Hader performing as Stefon on SNL alongside Seth Meyers. NBC

Of course, Hader is quick to point out that Barry isn’t him, or even much like him. “I’m not a violent person,” he says, as with everything, with a very deadpan delivery. “I don’t like violence. People always ask, ‘What’s it like getting to work with a gun?’ I don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, I like action movies, like Mad Max: Fury Road, and even monster movies—those are unreal, fantasy. But I grew up in the ’80s watching slasher films, and it was like, ‘God, another one of these?’”

That’s not to say violence in film didn’t leave an impression on Hader. He got his love of film from his parents, two big movie fans who exposed him to “very sophisticated, very adult things” at a young age. “All my friends wanted to see The Natural,” he says, “and meanwhile, I just watched Platoon with my dad.” He’s carried that obsession throughout his life, and possibly that early exposure—and his admitted distaste for violence—made him view some of the most iconic films in recent cinema history with a critical eye.

“I remember going to record stores and seeing Taxi Driver, with Robert De Niro holding two guns,” he says. “That’s not really the point. This guy is a broken, lonely person. Everyone seems to forget that after he kills all those people, he tries to blow his brains out, and he can’t. That’s a guy who just wanted to die. It’s really sad.”

“I think the nice thing about me is that people knew me on SNL, but not a lot of people, like, really knew me. They were just like, ‘Oh, that's the guy who does impressions.’”

There’s probably a little bit of De Niro’s Travis Bickle in every contemporary anti-hero, so it’s not a stretch to say that Barry’s veteran-turned-killer-for-hire has a little bit in common with the movie character. But Barry’s a little more … likeable, no? That’s probably because Hader plays him not just as a real, curious man, but also a funny one who mimics others in his ongoing desire to learn how to be a human. In one hilarious scene from the Season Two premiere, Barry works as a cashier in a Lululemon, speaking to customers with an ear-piercing Cockney accent because, as he learned from Cousineau, it’s important to bring your characters into the real world. It’s becoming easier for Barry to play someone else in real life than to be himself—an intensely funny moment on the show that’s also hiding something much more tragic.

There’s a certain alien quality to Barry as we watch him throughout the series, learning how to perform every day as a person by following Cousineau’s entry-level platitudes. (I’ll give Barry this: He’s becoming a better actor.) That’s probably why, despite him being a man who murders people, the audience is compelled to root for him to succeed—not at killing people, of course, but at leaving his violent past behind him. I’m not quite sure that will ever happen; on television, characters rarely change so drastically. And Hader confirms this by describing the central conflict of the second season.



“Season One was everyone trying to put out the best version of themselves,” he says. “The whole thing, ultimately, is about hope … the hope that things can be better for him. That there’s a better life for this guy, that he can forgive himself. But once you’re in this world of violence, and you perpetuate it, it’s the Macbeth thing. The spot you can’t get rid of.” Barry is always going to be a murderer, and he’ll always have to manage the double life he’s created for himself. “It’s hard to pivot out of that thing if you’re naturally good at it.”



Hader in the 2014 film The Skeleton Twins, in which he appeared with fellow SNL alum Kristen Wiig. Roadside Attractions

Not to compare Hader to Barry again, but the latter's desire to put something behind him is not completely foreign to the former, who is slowly shedding his outwardly goofy persona for something more serious. It’s something he’s been doing since 2014’s The Skeleton Twins, a drama in which Hader co-starred alongside fellow SNL alum Kristen Wiig. (The pair played estranged and depressed twin siblings; it opens with Wiig’s character contemplating suicide, and Hader’s character attempting the act.)

“I wanted to challenge myself and see if people would accept me in that,” Hader says. “I think the nice thing about me is that people knew me on SNL, but not a lot of people, like, really knew me. They were just like, ‘Oh, that's the guy who does impressions.’ I think that really worked in my favor. Now, when I do Barry, I’m not in my head.”

After talking with Bill Hader, I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen to Barry. Despite my better judgment, I like the guy. I want him to succeed! I don’t really expect him to break into Hollywood. Maybe he could land a sweet commercial gig? But I’d like him to be happy. I also hope he stops killing people, because I know that would make him happy!

And then I think that I’m being duped into liking a bad guy, an irredeemable character who makes a living murdering people—people who are mostly also bad, yes, or at least worse than the nicer people Barry has murdered to protect his own self-interests. And then I ruminate on that, the reality of Barry’s violent nature; we watch him compartmentalize his actions, we see him try to stick to his own version of a moral code. He falters at being a better person, which makes Barry incredibly human and very much like us.

But I don’t know if I will ever get to see that, if Barry will ever completely change himself. I mean, Hader tells me that it won’t happen, that Barry will always be a killer despite all of the hope I—and Barry himself—hold for the opposite outcome. The show reminds me a little bit of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories; the Southern writer’s work is full of idiosyncratic and grotesque characters, all of whom are stumbling toward some sense of grace. O’Connor rarely let her readers experience her characters’ ultimate atonement. She typically left that out of her stories, deliberate ambiguities that not only offered no easy answers, but also reflected her power as a writer who knew that the real world to which she was holding a mirror was also full of disappointment and doubt. “There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act,” O’Connor once said in a speech delivered at Georgetown University, “that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of redemption.”

“People always ask me, ‘Well, do you like Barry?’ I’m like, No! He kills people.”

Writers often reward their audiences, giving their readers the ending they most want to see for their characters. As a writer, Hader is completely uninterested in offering anything other than the honest truth. He’s not serving you metaphor and meaning. He’s not even able to hide his own feelings for his character. “People are complicated, and some of us are really fucking awful,” he says. “People always ask me, ‘Well, do you like Barry?’ I’m like, No! He kills people.”

The point of Barry is not that he’s likable (or not), but that he’s real—something that fuels the multi-hyphenate Hader’s artistic worldview. “I know what it feels like to not belong,” he says. “I don’t think you have to like [a character], but you do have to enjoy being them, to bring to them something that’s somewhat relatable.”

What’s more relatable, in our current era, than being disappointed in someone you admire? In a time when many of our cultural figureheads are exposing themselves as, well, unlikeable people, many of us are constantly questioning our own values in light of that constant disappointment. But the world keeps spinning, and we do have to keep moving with it, to manage those values even though they don’t always line up with our reality.

“As lame as it sounds, if you’re making a thing that you like, and that your friends like, and that you’re excited about, then it’ll be great,” Hader says. Julian Berman

But hey, that’s just my interpretation of Barry, as it’s a show that lends itself to that. But Hader isn't here to evangelize Barry's greater meaning as a piece of art, and he's only recently come to the uncomfortable acceptance that the show has the same power for its viewers as a book or short story would for a reader.

“You never write or create anything going like, ‘Well, where does this fit into the culture? How is the culture affecting this?’" he says. “It's always in retrospect. You have someone else tell it to you. I'll have someone at a dinner party go, ‘I think Barry, the character, represents America.’ And I go, ‘What?’”

Bill Hader and Henry Winkler on the set of Barry. Isabella Vosmikova/HBO

“Then, I think about it and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, I see kind of what you mean, if that's the way you look at it,’” he continued, explaining that Barry is America because he's “sweet, beautiful, always want to better himself, but is inherently incredibly violent.”



“But, I would never in a million years say that. I'd be too embarrassed. It's so embarrassing, and we don't write it that way.”

Hader isn’t trying to solve any big problems here as much as he’s telling a story about a particular group of people who find themselves coming together in an acting class to pursue a shared dream. They all have their own motivations, Barry included. And it’s important to remember that while Barry has its dark moments, it’s still a TV show. It’s a comedy series! And Bill Hader, despite his tendency toward a surprising earnestness (and because of his refreshing lack of vanity), is a writer and performer—albeit a famous and somewhat beloved one!—who just wants to make something good.

“As lame as it sounds, if you’re making a thing that you like, and that your friends like, and that you’re excited about, then it’ll be great,” he says. “Other people might not be into it, or might think it's a little crass or whatever, but you just have to get that inspirational feeling that drives it [rather] than overthinking it and going, ‘Maybe it's this.’ Or, ‘People might be mad if we do that.’ Nah, just go for it.”