The following story contains spoilers for Season 3 of HBO’s Barry.
IN MOST stories, when the person driving the plot by doing bad things—whether they’re a villain, an anti-hero, or anything in between—gets caught, the end is usually near. And that’s the truth for HBO’s Barry, which wrapped up its dark, dramatic, and still very funny third season with its titular character (played by co-creator, co-writer, and frequent director Bill Hader) getting caught by the police and arrested for his latest attempted murder. With the show’s protagonist in custody, that would seem to indicate a conclusion approaching.
But Barry is taking things further, wrapping its story up with a full season of plot after Barry’s arrest. Is this typical storytelling? No! Is it par for the course with Barry, one of the most inventive, exciting, and, yes, hilarious, shows on TV over the last five years? Hell yes.
“Last season ended, and people were like, Why do another season? But they’ve said that to us every season,” Hader, who’s won two Emmys for his leading role in Barry, says over Zoom before laughing. “I was interested to see what happened to these characters, and how what happened at the end of Season 3 changed them. That was really important.”
Hader has had many looks through the years: the bespectacled, goofy cop in Superbad. The buttoned-up and lovable romantic interest to Amy Schumer (and best friend to LeBron James) in Trainwreck. The Marine/hitman/aspiring actor who just wants to please his mentor, Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), in the early seasons of Barry.
But right now, as he discusses the conclusion of the most significant project of his career, he looks how Barry looks in Season 3 and 4; bearded, engaged in conversation, but a little on edge about the major life moment that’s about to come with the debut of Barry‘s final season. He’s ready to move on. Filming was done months ago, and, for him, the show is in the rearview mirror. But it’s clear that for now, and probably until the series finale airs on May 28, Hader is still firmly in Barry mode.
Even his influences, as the show has continued, have waned. Early on, Hader says, he got significant influence from the movies he was watching and the books he was reading, and it’s clear that his interest in film has paid off. His talent as a director is constantly on display, from Season 3’s incredible Beignet bag/chase scene sequence, to a Season 4 meeting brokered by NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) at what he calls the greatest place in the world—a Dave and Buster’s.
“By the time we got to Season 4, you kind of understand the characters so well, and the cast so well, and it’s kind of its own thing,” Hader says. And that should be music to the ears of Barry fans, because this is a show that’s always thrived at “being its own thing.”
There’s nothing on TV with a tone quite like Barry, and Hader clearly understands—and embraces—that. Men’s Health spoke to him about how his own anxiety bleeds into the high-tension nature of the show, his decision to wrap things up, and what he could be up to next.
Men’s Health: Before we get to Barry, I want to ask something a little broad: what’s the project in your career that you consider the most underrated?
Bill Hader: I don’t know how many people saw it, but I did this show called Documentary Now!. There’s an episode of that called “The Eye Doesn’t Lie,” that I think is the funniest thing I’ve ever been in. That episode makes me laugh so hard. And one of the actors in it, Gary Kraus, that’s why I cast him as the Chief of Police in Barry—because he’s so funny in “The Eye Doesn’t Lie.”
I love Documentary Now! too. I actually just sent someone the gif of you with sweatpants on your head over the weekend.
Oh that’s neat. [LAUGHS] Seth Meyers wrote that—the sweatpants on the head.
You’ve spoken about your experience with anxiety in the past. I’m curious—especially with Barry being such a high-tension show all the time—if there’s any way you find that feeling bleeding into your work on the show.
Oh yeah. I mean, I think that anxiety fuels some of it, within the writing and what some of the characters go through. Without a doubt.
And also sometimes you use it in the performances. It’s OK to open up to that. The biggest thing I’ve learned about anxiety is that the more I fought it, the worse it got. So, you kind of have to let it in, and just say, like, Well, I’m anxious. It can be so overwhelming, and you can physically feel a certain way; for me, I get very dizzy, or my arms and legs get very heavy, and just, Oh my god.
But it’s just taking care of yourself. Even just meditating, or exercising… all the stuff they tell you to do, it actually does help. It’s very cathartic to be able to put that stuff in for the characters, and also use it in the performance.
In terms of anxiety, is there a specific character or moment in Barry that you relate most to? Something you put in the show and just find yourself thinking Wow, that really rings true.
I would say the stuff the Sally character (Sarah Goldberg) goes through. It’s also very exaggerated, but there’s some stuff that Sally goes through this season that I can relate to, in terms of the tension of something, and being really paranoid. I’ve felt that way before in my life.
Did you always envision Barry as a four-season show? Or do you remember the moment you decided We’re going to do four, and that’s going to be it?
I didn’t know how many seasons it was going to be, but then by the time we got to outlining… once the end of Season 3 happened, and Barry was caught, Season 4 was suddenly just a ball rolling down a hill. The cat’s out of the bag, and you’ve got to wrap it up, you know? But the way it wrapped up, I did not see at all. It was totally different. But wrapping it up—it felt like it needed to end after four.
Between his friends from the Marines, Gene, Fuches, and NoHo Hank, we see Barry have all different kinds of male friendships throughout the course of the show. What do you think Barry is trying to say about the different types of relationships that guys can have?
I definitely feel that with Fuches (Stephen Root) and Cousineau (Henry Winkler)… Casey Bloys, who’s the head of HBO, said that he always saw this story as being about a guy between two dads. There’s his acting class/I’m a good person dad, and there’s his hitman/piece of shit dad. And it seems that Fuches, actually, is the one who’s most honest with him, and Cousineau is the one who’s more into it about himself. Barry projects all that stuff onto Cousineau that may not actually be there.
I feel like those are relationships you have with anyone—men or women. With NoHo Hank, I feel like it’s always been incredibly one-sided; NoHo Hank really loves Barry, and I think Barry uses Hank when he needs him, but I don’t think Barry’s actually been really respectful to Hank.
Doing this project over the course of 5+ years, what have you learned about yourself as a person and as a performer/creator now that it’s coming to an end?
Oh man. I understand myself a lot better than I did when we started. I think I have much more confidence in myself as a filmmaker, director, and a writer, and also having the understanding that you need a solid foundation with the script. If you have a really good script, and you spend a lot of time making sure that script works, everything else falls into place very easily. But you’ve got to really work at making the script solid. That’s always been a very important thing for me, moving into other areas. Like, if I want to make a movie, or do these other things, that’s going to be a huge part of it.
I love the tone of the show so much. I feel like a lot of the time you watch a dark comedy, and it’s dark, but it doesn’t quite go all the way there. But every time I’m watching Barry, I feel like anything could happen and anyone could die at any moment.
Yeah. Yeah.
Did you consciously want to get there from the start?
It’s gotten more dire. It’s funny, because when the show came out, people were like Wow, this is really dark, and then it just got darker. And then I think now… [LAUGHING] people might think, like, What the hell is this? But I always really liked that.
I’m kind of like you. It’s like, well, what would happen? What’s the truth? It’s just trying to move toward some sense of honesty, and whatever that sense of honesty is.
You’ve worn so many different hats while working on Barry. Now that you’ve gotten all this experience doing all sorts of cool, experimental kinds of stuff on the show, what would you want to do from here? What’s next that you haven’t gotten to do yet?
I’d like to make a movie. I’d like to make something that’s an hour and a half, so that’s, like, the equivalent of three episodes, and just focus on that amount of time.
Someone pointed out to me that since July 2021 until last month, basically, I’ve directed the equivalent of four movies. And so it’s a lot of work, and it’s very draining, but once it’s done it feels great. It feels great to finally be at the end on this, but the sad part is saying goodbye to all these great people we’ve worked with.
But I would like to make a movie. That’s the short answer.
Do you have any subject in mind?
I have three ideas. One, [Barry writer and Hader’s friend since high school]Duffy Boudreau and I wrote a script, and then I have two other ideas. I can’t really share them, because they’re still figuring them out. But you write a version of the script, you feel good about it, and then you read it again and you go What the hell are we thinking? You throw that out, and you do another, and you go Oh, maybe it’s this? And it takes a while.
But once it’s done, you start feeling like you’ve really got something.
This interview has been condensed for content and clarity.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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