When Bill Hader went temporarily blind on live television: “I’m freaking out”
If you see Bill Hader in a movie, then you know it’s going to be funny.
Whether he’s a policeman in Superbad, a bemused boyfriend in Trainwreck, or an incompetent scientist in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, he’s good for a laugh every single time, except for maybe his role in It: Chapter Two, but that really wasn’t his fault.
Like many of his fellow modern comedy stalwarts, Hader got his big break thanks to Saturday Night Live. The native ‘Okie’ joined the American institution in 2005 and remained a cast member for eight years. A master of impressions, he took on everyone from Daniel Day-Lewis to James Carville to Vince Price, and while not all his sketches were winners, his combined body of work on the show is up there with the very best.
The thing about SNL is that, being live, with the exception of a few pre-taped sketches, everything you see on the show is exactly how it is inside the studio, which means, when things go wrong, they can go really wrong. Unfortunately, Hader discovered this for himself on the Christmas special from 2005, as he recalled to his fellow castmate Seth Meyers on his late-night show, that he suffered a panic attack right before he was due to go in front of the camera.
“I’m really anxious. I’m muttering to myself, freaking out. And then my vision goes,” he revealed, “I had to hold on to Jason Sudeikis and just try to figure out what my line is. Jason is like, ‘I’ll take your lines, buddy, don’t you worry’.” Once they had gotten through the skit, Hader was checked on by the show’s nurse, who also had to inform the star what was going on during the rest of the runtime. “The nurse was like, ‘Oh, they just did this pre-taped thing with Andy [Samberg] and Chris Parnell rapping about the Chronicles of Narnia‘,” he said, which is about the most SNL thing you could possibly imagine.
Hader has been incredibly open about his anxiety issues, discussing how he used to struggle to sleep the night before an episode of SNL and that it took him four seasons to feel even somewhat comfortable with being on the show. Even then, things didn’t always run smoothly, and in 2010, he suffered another panic attack live on air, this time while impersonating Julian Assange.
Unsurprisingly, he is far from the only person to have had an on-air mishap while working for Lorne Michaels, where Jason Bateman once almost had his face ripped off by an angry chimpanzee during his time on the show. Then there’s John Belushi, who, while playing his famous ‘Samurai’ character, accidentally caught Buck Henry in the face with his sword, forcing him into immediate medical attention backstage. Alongside the skit skirmishes, there have also been various intentional disruptions, like Sinead O’Connor’s infamous protest against the Pope and basically everything Steven Seagal ever did on the show; you don’t get to the best part of 1,000 episodes without a few things going wrong.
Knowing what Hader was going through behind the scenes simply makes his time on SNL even more impressive. His persistence in overcoming his anxiety is nothing short of inspirational, and even if he did nearly faint on national television several times, he’s never quit, and we’re grateful for it.
