Bill Hader’s performance in Barry is great, even for the SNL alum

In the series premiere of HBO’s BarryBill Hader, Bill Hader’s title character delivers Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), an imitative monologue about a soldier who returns from Afghanistan to kill people in exchange for money. The specifics he conjures — about a family friend who’s like an uncle lining up this job where he only kills “pieces of shit” — are vivid, and the performance feels almost uncomfortably authentic. It should be; after all, it’s really a confession. It impresses Cousineau enough that he invites Barry into his acting class. Each subsequent time that Barry gives a competent performance onstage, the reaction is similar — stunned silence that gives way to effusive praise. Subtext remains the same. He Do That?

Get in early Barry’s run, the same could have been asked of Hader, who is still probably best known as Stefon, the giggling nightclub guru from Saturday Night Live. However, Barry enters its third season, it’s no longer surprising to see Hader carry an emotionally nuanced scene on his back. His multi-dimensional, multidimensional Barry character is his greatest achievement as an actor. Hader’s infused him with gallows humor, deep pathos, and a seemingly limitless capacity for violence. It was the best part. Works. Hader, one of TV’s most talented actors, has made his mark. Barry’s run, and he’s done it by using the character to push his own limits.

If watching Hader flex that kind of range was somewhat astonishing at first, it’s because his pre-Barry resume didn’t really indicate he could handle it. Hader was cast in SNL In 2005, he had no previous experience on screen. His role was that of a utility-man, providing a set of sound impressions and infectious humor to any sketch. In blockbuster comedy films like Superbad Get Knocked UpHe was able to get a few lines but mostly acted as an antagonist for his fellow stars. In the end, he joined animation voice-over, along with almost every famous comedian of his time.

He created and stars in the series. Get Documentary NowAlthough he was a highly ambitious comedian about nonfiction filmmaking and satire, the characters that he played were often more cartoonish than complex, nuanced human beings. Hader, who was often hilarious in all of these roles was an excellent team player and did every task with great generosity. It took two important roles on film in the middle of the 2010s for Hader to really prove his acting abilities: the silent Sundance indie. Skeleton TwinsJudd apatow’s romantic comedy Trainwreck.

Skeleton TwinsMilo is a gay, troubled man who tries to kill himself. His estranged twin Kristen Wiig (him) helps him. The movie is a bit of a soporific drag, but Hader evinces Milo’s deep pathos as his layers of sarcastic self-defense peel away and we learn more about his traumas and struggles — pathos he’d use again to brilliant effect in bringing Barry’s undiagnosed PTSD to life. Trainwreck is primarily a vehicle for Amy Schumer’s ribald comedy, but in letting everyone else (including an underrated LeBron James, who apparently forgot how to act between then and Space Jam: A New Legacy) have a turn being the funniest person in the room, Hader’s moments of hilarity hit that much harder. He displayed his generosity as he did on SNL He did this with more screen time. He was now a high-profile actor, and his flashes in limited roles were translating into gigs that featured him as a star. His next move was more dramatic.

Barry Premiered in 2018, towards the end of the auteur TV boom. Louie, Master of none, Atlanta The critical discussion was dominated by them. These programs were meant to give a glimpse into the private lives of their creators, allowing them to see the differences between their public image and what they actually saw as the normal people. Hader is definitely running Barry like an auteur; he’s credited as creator, executive producer, writer, director, and top-billed star. The Marine assassin that he plays is so different from the one portrayed in his autobiography, Bill Hader’s persona of Bill Hader as it exists today seems almost absent. Barry’s secret shadow life means he’s a different person to everyone he interacts with, and Hader embodies all those people with aplomb. You can find Hader often on. Barry, Hader is playing straight man to somebody — Winkler, Anthony Carrigan as the uproarious NoHo Hank, his childlike acting classmates. It’s a choice that forces his comedy to operate in a more understated register, a state in which it thrives.

Photo: Aaron Epstein/HBO

Photo by Merrick Moron/HBO

To a large extent, Hader’s performance dictates just what kind of show it is, moment to moment. When he’s not tapping into the profound grimness of his life, Barry is a truly terrible actor (“Hey Ike, you shitbird! Do you want to know a little more? piiiie?”), and Hader’s hammy presence in those scenes yields some of the show’s biggest laughs. They’re necessary moments, because practically everything else Hader does is awash in darkness. On even his more successful jobs, he’s a calculating but exhausted killer, dispatching his victims with resignation and weariness. If a hit goes horribly wrong, he becomes an animal of complete self-preservation who will do any thing to ensure he doesn’t get killed or caught. He’s also prone to paroxysms of random violence, as in the season 2 finale, when he indiscriminately kills nearly everyone at the Burmese mob’s monastery hideout while seeking revenge on his former partner, Fuches (Stephen Root). In his many moments of guilt over the heinous acts he’s committed, he becomes despondent and depressed, and the show challenges the audience to find Barry sympathetic — or to at least empathize with his situation — despite whatever desperate frenzy or evil he’s just unleashed. That’s high-wire work, but Hader handles it with grace.

Hader is well-known as a cinephile. Barry feels like a deliberate nod to the “came back different” canon of American films, mostly made during and after unpopular wars. You can see shades of First Blood’s John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in Barry’s blood-soaked rampages, and his moments of extreme alienation recall Bob Clark’s 1974 post-Vietnam nightmare, Deathdream. Like Dan Stevens’ character in 2014’s The Guest, Barry’s training as a killer came from Uncle Sam, who promptly lost interest in helping him the minute Fuches walked him out of the veterans hospital. More recently, Barry’s thwarted attempts at orderliness were echoed by Oscar Isaac in Paul Schrader’s austere Abu Ghraib drama The card counterIt suggests that there is a two-way conversation between them Barry The broader antiwar film genre. Hader is a little bit of an aberration in that film. Anybody who listens to this show will be amazed at what it has in store for them. SNL The American war machine will be criticized timely, as the alum was up to. It’s a canny bit of agitprop that Hader’s committed performance helps sell.

Photo by Merrick Moron/HBO

Photo by Merrick Moron/HBO

The pilot episode of Barry’s off-kilter third season, the walls are closing in for Barry — even more than they already were after the monastery massacre. He has lost all contact with those he believed in, as well as the distinction between actor and assassin. The darkness Hader brings to the character in this season seems to come from a deeper, crueler chasm, and his behavior becomes so unhinged that it feels like a dare to keep laughing at the show’s increasingly pitch-black comedy.

In “Limonada,” the season’s excellent second episode, Barry unleashes a terrifying torrent of verbal abuse at his girlfriend, Sally (Sarah Goldberg), when she fails to come through with a part on her show for Cousineau. Barry kills people to make a living. But that tirade can be hard to see on TV, especially with a show that is so violent. Barry. Barry thinks yelling at Sally will allow him to help Cousineau and redeem himself in the process, but in reality, he’s hurting all of them, furthering a cycle of abuse and trauma that he’s long since lost the ability to break.

This wrinkle reveals the dark heart of the show, one it’s been moving toward all along — that violence is inherently corrosive, and that keeping the good and evil within a person separated never lasts long. Everything eventually becomes poisoned when the darkness prevails. To play Barry as the least likable character on his own show requires Hader to summon the generosity he’s displayed throughout his career and twist it into something corrupt. He’s as game as ever. This may be the start of the ultimate unraveling of a character who was never all that put-together to begin with, but with Hader in the driver’s seat, the audience is in good hands.