The actor so convincing Bill Hader thought he was a criminal: “So believable”
As anyone who has seen the 2013 Saturday Night Live sketch ‘Don’ You Go Rounin’ Roun to Re Ro’ knows, Bill Hader is a mega-fan of British crime movies.
In this amusing skit, Hader plays a London gangster released from prison who quickly becomes embroiled in an underworld scheme. The sketch starts with Hader attempting some kind of exaggerated cockney geezer accent, but then hilariously descends into nonsense, with everyone speaking in gibberish that only vaguely sounds like an accent Guy Ritchie would sanction in his movies.
If it wasn’t obvious that Hader has a lot of affection for these kinds of films from the sketch, his explanation of why he loves them, as told to Conan O’Brien, will do the trick. “I like to watch British crime movies where you can’t understand what anybody’s saying,” he said with a huge grin. “Those are my favourite kind.”
He went on to wax lyrical about Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast, which he thinks is amazing, despite being unable to comprehend much of the dialogue uttered by Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, and Ian McShane. In the end, though, this may be part of the unique selling point for Hader, as he chuckled, “I just sit and watch those for hours.”
In truth, Hader’s deep fondness for the tales of Blighty’s cops and robbers can likely be traced back to a film he saw at the tender age of eight. It’s a film no eight-year-old should ever see, let alone be interested in seeing, and yet Hader was no ordinary child. In fact, he admitted in another interview that he watched A Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver at the same sleepover when he was only 10. This guy was a dyed-in-the-wool cinephile from the very beginning.
Anyway, as a young, impressionable eight-year-old with extremely liberal parents, Hader watched Mona Lisa, a 1986 neo-noir by Neil Jordan about an ex-con named George who becomes infatuated with a high-class prostitute in fear for her life. Hader was transfixed by the short, hairy, dangerous man playing the working-class gangster, and became utterly convinced that this was no actor. Instead, he believed “they paid some low-rent criminal money to be in this movie.”
Naturally, this was not the case, and an actor indeed played George. However, his performance didn’t only feel real to the young Hader; it was so credible, lived-in, and charismatic that the actor won a Golden Globe and a Bafta for it. In addition, he was nominated for ‘Best Actor’ at the Academy Awards, and even though he lost out to a resurgent Paul Newman for The Colour of Money, his hair-trigger turn as George is still regarded as one of the best of his storied career.
“When I first saw Mona Lisa, I had no idea who Bob Hoskins was,” Hader chuckled to Criterion in 2011. “He was so believable that when I saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I was like, ‘Hey, that guy really turned his life around. This movie is huge. Good for him.'”
Indeed, after seeing Robert Zemeckis’ legendary live-action/animation hybrid and realising Hoskins was, in fact, not some gangster pulled in off the street and offered movie stardom, Hader most likely sought out the iconic star’s other roles. It would be astonishing if that didn’t quickly lead him to The Long Good Friday, the definitive British gangster movie after which so many others were modelled, and the first taste most people had of Hoskins’ unique combination of coiled rage and unexpected empathy.
