“That was the lowest of the low”: Bill Hader names the worst job he had in Hollywood
There’s no industry quite as nepotistic as Hollywood.
‘It’s not what you know but who you know’ is a phrase that seems to prop up the entire employee network of the film industry, with said problem only worsening in the modern digital age. Heck, even Maya Hawke, the child of Hollywood royalty Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, was once told to get her follower count up if she wanted to bag a much sought-after acting role.
But there are still a defiant group of actors who did it the old-fashioned way: making coffees, sweeping up dusty film sets and bowing to the every command of actors who came before them. Being visible on the set of any Hollywood project was often the simple starting place for anyone wishing to enjoy the fame and riches of silver-screen stardom, which would eventually be achieved after a slow but credible rise through the ranks.
That’s how Bill Hader got his start. He didn’t just magically appear on the SNL set after a high-profile uncle made some calls; instead, he made himself known at whatever dog’s body job was required of him until he finally got the call forward to contribute.
“I’m a movie fanatic,” he explained to co-star Danny McBride, as he reminisced on how they got their Hollywood start, adding, “I just want to get into the movie industry. My parents totally got it. So the money they’d set aside for me to go to college, I used to live on when I moved to LA. I was just PA’ing on the smallest, shittiest movies all the way up to Spider-Man, the one with Tobey Maguire and [James] Franco.”
That was one of the fonder memories that Hader recalled from his days as a Hollywood apprentice. But he assured McBride that there were much darker moments. While one memory was tasked with chauffeuring The Karate Kid trilogy’s Martin Kove to a movie set, just for Kove to deliberately derail their journey and render them both to a bollocking once they arrived on set, something else stood out as the murky depths of his career.
While the role came with something of a promotion, the project on which it required his services left Hader questioning if his career was really destined for stardom after.
He remembered, “For a week, I was stage manager on this Playboy show Night Calls,” adding, “But that was the lowest of the low. I wasn’t going to tell my parents I was running to Starbucks to get coffee for a bunch of porn stars.”
Three years after Spider-Man, Hader got his big break and was cast as a regular member of SNL, where he would slowly rise to comedy royalty. Just two years after that, he would star in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up and Superbad, becoming somewhat of a regular face in the Apatow generation of comedy movies. Within that much-deserved rise to the top, he would end up sharing sets with Franco, which would have rightly served as a reminder of just how far he had come.
