As fans eagerly await the return of Bill Hader’s hit TV show Barry on April 24th, Hader has been opening up about his anxiety both on and off-screen.
“Anxiety is always fighting those voices in your head saying, ‘Here’s all the bad things that are going to happen,’” the actor told The Hollywood Reporter. “Weirdly, I have a harder time with day-to-day stuff, as opposed to running a TV show.”
One of the things that helps Hader’s anxiety, as it turns out, is sugar. Lots of sugar! The Saturday Night Live alum admits that sweets are his coping mechanism. “I’ve walked to Vons at midnight with a spoon in my pocket because I know I’m going to buy ice cream and I’m going to eat it on the way back,” he says. “The minute it’s mine, I’m eating this shit and I’ll probably finish it before I get back home. And it just makes me feel like a piece of shit. But, yeah, that’s my stress thing.” He is definitely not alone in that.
The actor also told a story about leaving the SNL set on a Friday at 2 am, eating an Entenmann’s coffeecake with his bare hands in an aisle of the iconic New York City supermarket Gristedes. “The shame of bringing the empty box up to the cashier and him being like, ‘Dude,’” Hader says. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, man,” Hader said.
Despite his anxieties, Hader serves as executive producer, writer, and director on the upcoming season Barry. Henry Winkler, who also stars on the show, says Hader never let his apprehension show. “He used to mouth your words,” Winkler says. “He knew everybody’s lines because he wrote them, he and his wonderful staff. And you would see him saying your line with you and you would have to say, ‘Bill, Bill, you’re mouthing the words again.’”
While Barry season three was written pre-pandemic, Hader admits to having to go in and do re-writes to appeal to audiences as the times have changed. “We were trying to get more to the reality of things,” Hader says. “Are we getting to the honesty of this, the brutal honesty of it? Are we going too far? Is this too silly? Is this too disturbing?” Since fans have been eagerly waiting nearly three years for a new season, odds are good that they will stick around for this season.
Barry season three premieres on HBO on April 24th.