Arnold Schwarzenegger, traffic jams, and Bill Hader’s inauspicious Hollywood debut
While it’s easy to categorise Bill Hader as just one of the countless Saturday Night Live stars who went on to achieve success in Hollywood, his route to the top was far longer and more winding than that.
It’s undeniably true that the actor and comedian used SNL as the springboard to get to where he is now, with the show having spent 50 years as a pipeline that sets aspiring stars on the road to greatness, but he’s been around the block a few times before he even made his debut on October 1st, 2005.
Hader initially wanted to be a filmmaker, and he got there eventually by co-creating, writing, directing, and executive producing HBO’s acclaimed series, Barry, but after finding those opportunities virtually non-existent, he wedged his foot in the door by becoming a production assistant.
It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the world, especially when he was working for Playboy TV, but he did manage to land work on an assortment of random productions, like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Dwayne Johnson’s The Scorpion King, and the Star Wars documentary, Empire of Dreams.
Another project where Hader served as an uncredited PA was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage, the run-of-the-mill actioner where the ‘Austrian Oak’ travels to Colombia to single-handedly exact his revenge on the terrorist organisation responsible for the death of his family.
It was not a good movie, and it bombed at the box office, but thanks to a traffic jam, it landed Hader his first onscreen role in a movie, not that he was credited for it. “The actor was stuck in traffic, and they had to shoot the scene,” he explained. “So they put me in as the pilot in this uniform.”
Originally, in his blink and you’ll miss it part as a pilot, Hader wasn’t supposed to have a line, “But my bosses, the first AD and second AD, thought it was so funny that I was in there that they said, ‘Well, maybe we should have him tell Arnold Schwarzenegger this…'” It might have been a gag at his expense, but it still became etched in history as the star’s first spoken words in a feature.
If you watch Collateral Damage, which doesn’t come highly recommended because it’s crap, you can hear Hader’s vocal introduction to the world of cinema: “There’s a scene that takes place on a plane, and I’m the pilot,” he explained. “My line is, ‘Three or four hours, depending on the weather’. Which we came up with on the spot.”
Not the most auspicious debut, then, but he got there eventually, with Hader taking the first steps toward stardom on SNL almost four years after Collateral Damage premiered in February 2002.
