It’s the End of ‘Barry’ as We Know It – and Bill Hader Feels Fine (Exclusive)

Bill Hader is laughing.

It’s the final week of principal photography on the final season of “Barry,” the Emmy-winning HBO series he launched in 2018 with co-creator Alec Berg, and even though Hader is coming to the end of a season-long shoot that saw him directing every episode himself, when TheWrap visits the set in November 2022, Hader is calm, cool and downright joyful.

It’s a refreshing contrast to the stories of filmmakers who come to the end of directing an entire season of TV and subsequently swear off ever trying that again. But it’s not an altogether surprising one, considering Hader has wanted to be a director his whole life — a dream that was somewhat put on hold when he landed “Saturday Night Live” at age 27.

“He’s so fluid and chill,” Anthony Carrigan, who plays Noho Hank on the HBO series, told TheWrap of Hader’s directing style. “There’s no pretense. He just is who he is, and that doesn’t change. But what that belies is this genius that you aren’t even aware of. He’s done his homework, he’s prepared.”

Henry Winkler, who plays Barry’s mentor and sometimes-nemesis Gene Cousineau, called Hader a “sure presence” behind the camera. “You feel you’re in the hands of someone really in charge, that he’s got the vision,” he said.

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Hader wasn’t an obvious choice to direct the show’s pilot — after all, he didn’t have a directorial credit to his name. But he immediately set the stage in striking fashion for this unique comedy about a hitman who decides to become an actor, blending a stark realism (the violence presented as nakedly unsettling, not glorified) with sometimes absurdist or surreal undertones to its comedy.

In short, he had a very clear idea of how “Barry” was supposed to look and feel. He would end up winning a Director’s Guild of America award for the pilot episode and two additional DGA awards for episodes from subsequent seasons.

The idea to direct all eight episodes of Season 4 was first planted by unit production manager Aida Rodgers while filming Season 3. She sat Hader down and insisted he was the only one for the job. In hindsight, Hader says the decision was probably the best for all involved.

“I had grown very much as a writer and as a director, and I had a very clear idea of how everything should look,” Hader told TheWrap months after we visited the set as he was putting the finishing touches on the series’ final episodes.

“I think it got to a place where it made more sense for me to do them all, because I think you could’ve brought in Martin Scorsese and I still would’ve been like, ‘Oh no, the camera needs to go over there!’” he said with a laugh. “I would’ve driven everybody crazy because I was so clear with the way I thought it needed to look.”

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One person who isn’t surprised by how naturally Hader took to directing is his childhood best friend Duffy Boudreau, who serves as a writer and co-executive producer on “Barry.” The two met in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and bonded over their shared obsessions with movies, even making their own films together as teens.

“I remember one of the first times we were hanging out he was just describing the end of ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God,’ where Klaus Kinski has all the monkeys climbing all over him,” Boudreau recalled. “He was re-enacting the scene for me and I was like, ‘Oh, this dude’s great.’”

It’s the deep love and knowledge of film that Boudreau credits, in part, for Hader’s instincts as a filmmaker. “Just him knowing what he wants and having that deep visual vocabulary in his head of all the stuff that we’ve been watching since we were kids, it just really sunk in him in a way where he’s absorbed it.”

Hader directed three episodes in the first season of “Barry,” two in the second and five in the third. But it was the Season 2 episode “ronny/lily,” a largely self-contained storyline in which Barry squares off against a Taekwondo master in a series of increasingly bizarre and hilarious run-ins, that served as a turning point for him as a filmmaker, at least in the public’s eye.

“Even the cool moments, the kind of more showy moments like the motorcycle chase or ‘ronny/lily,’ they’re still hopefully in reference to telling the story,” Hader said. “You just go, ‘Oh, we can have a motorcycle chase here, but what if we did a motorcycle chase in the style of ‘Barry’?”

Hader recalled having a conversation with his editor Franky Guttman about the chase in Season 3 episode “710N,” during which Guttman asked why there were no inserts. While Hader was confident enough in his style choice to stand by it, he points to that as one way he’s grown as a filmmaker since the series’ premiere.

“I think it’s mostly being able to trust my instincts, understanding certain technical things, understanding how to cut in a way and what can and can’t be done in an editing room, and just knowing that my best work when I’m a director comes when I’m thinking in terms of how to tell the story as opposed to, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?’”

It’s that focus on story that led to the decision to end “Barry” after four seasons.

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Once Hader and the show’s writers decided that Barry was going to be caught at the end of Season 3, they felt it was heading towards its natural conclusion (“The ball’s kind of rolling downhill now,” Hader said). Still, he left the door open for a better idea to arise during the writing process. It wasn’t until they were writing Season 4 — and even went far down an alternate story path that was eventually scrapped — that Hader and his team felt confident that this is where Barry’s story must end.

This fourth and final season is the thematic culmination of everything that’s come before, as the characters are forced to confront their true selves and decide how to live with that going forward — embrace it or craft a new mask to hide behind. Hader’s performance as Barry is particularly dark in the season opener, in which he’s in jail and reckoning with the consequences of his actions. “I’m a bad person,” Barry says point blank after bashing his hand against a prison wall.

Hader’s assured filmmaking prowess is still on display in Season 4, and one episode is an especially delightful, stirring departure for the series that showcases his range behind the camera.

To that end, while he’s closing the book on “Barry,” Hader hopes to next direct a feature. He and Boudreau wrote a script for a film they’re trying to finance that he describes as a “smaller movie” set in early 1990s Oklahoma. He also has two other ideas: One’s a horror comedy — “more tonally like ‘Barry,’ but whereas ‘Barry’ is a crime thing, this is a horror thing,” — and the other he says is harder to explain. He even has another idea for a possible TV show, but that one’s “still percolating.”

Back on the “Barry” set, Hader is offering notes to an actor who’s having trouble with a line as cinematographer Carl Herse politely nudges that they’re losing the light. Hader is almost nonchalant but assuring when speaking to the actor, like it’s no big deal. He basically skips back to video village, eager to watch the next take.

The actor nails it — perfect — and a lens flare pops up in just the right spot on the frame.

The first A.D. calls cut and Hader shouts “Yes!” and pumps his fist, running out from video village to rally his actor and crew in a round of applause.

For a show that can be so sad, so tragic, so heartbreaking, the vibe was jubilant. Hader is in his happy place.

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