Bill Hader (born 1978) is the American actor, writer and director who played adult Richie Tozier in It Chapter Two and co-created HBO’s Barry.
Quick Specs
| Born | William Thomas Hader Jr., June 7, 1978, Tulsa, Oklahoma |
| Saturday Night Live | cast member 2005 to 2013; co-creator of Stefon with John Mulaney |
| Horror centerpiece | adult Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier in It Chapter Two (2019) |
| Barry (HBO, 2018 to 2023) | co-creator, star, writer, director and executive producer |
| Awards | Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2018, 2019); three DGA Awards for directing Barry; a 2008 Peabody as part of SNL; a 2009 Emmy as a South Park producer |
| Voice leads | Flint Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009); Fear in Inside Out (2015) |
| Horror directing | They Know, his first feature as writer, director and star (announced 2026) |
Who He Is
William Thomas Hader Jr. was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 7, 1978. His mother, Sherri, taught dance; his father, Bill Sr., worked jobs from restaurant manager to truck driver and did stand-up on the side. He has two younger sisters. By his own account he had a hard time focusing in class, was always joking around and didn’t feel he fit in, so he watched movies and read. His father showed him Monty Python and British comedy, and as a teenager he made short films with his friend Duffy Boudreau.
His grades kept him out of the top film schools, so he studied at The Art Institute of Phoenix and Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, worked as a Christmas tree salesman and an usher at a Tempe cinema, and moved to Los Angeles in 1999. Hader has told how he lost the usher job by spoiling the ending of Titanic for a rude crowd; he is the only source for the story.
He wanted to direct, not perform. For years he was a production assistant working 18-hour days, with credits on Spider-Man (2002), Collateral Damage (2002) and the documentary Empire of Dreams (2004). He quit after a bad experience on The Scorpion King and was working as an assistant editor on Iron Chef America when his life changed.
In March 2003 he started classes at The Second City in Los Angeles and formed a sketch group, Animals From The Future, which played backyard shows in Van Nuys. One member, Matt Offerman, told his brother Nick Offerman about it, and Nick told his wife, Megan Mullally. She came to a show and recommended Hader to Lorne Michaels. Hader had no agent and no material for his audition, so he fell back on an Italian man he’d once overheard. That impression became Vinny Vedecci, his first recurring SNL character.
He married the writer-director Maggie Carey in 2006; they have three daughters and divorced in 2018.
The Work, and What He Did in It
Hader joined Saturday Night Live as a featured player on October 1, 2005, and later compared the jump from Second City to SNL to going “from preschool to Harvard.” He became the show’s impressions man, filling the utility role his hero Phil Hartman had played: Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood, James Carville, Julian Assange, Keith Morrison and, for horror fans, Vincent Price. His Price hosted spoof holiday specials, including a 2008 “Vincent Price’s Halloween Special.” John Mulaney recalled Lorne Michaels walking up just before one aired and asking, “I like this, but why now?” The joke worked anyway, Mulaney said, because everyone recognized a host trying to stay upbeat while ridiculous guests made his life hell. Hader’s own characters included the mic-swinging reporter Herb Welch, “The Californians” and, above all, Stefon, the club-kid “city correspondent” on Weekend Update, co-created with Mulaney. Hader earned his first Emmy nomination for SNL in 2012 and left after eight seasons; his last show as a regular was May 18, 2013, when Stefon “married” Seth Meyers.
At the same time he was building a film career in supporting parts: Officer Slater in Superbad (2007), plus Knocked Up, Hot Rod, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder and Adventureland. From South Park’s 12th season he worked on the show as creative consultant, producer and voice actor, a job he said he took to learn story structure, and he shared its 2009 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. He voiced the inventor Flint Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and Fear in Pixar’s Inside Out (2015) (“I’m a big wimp… I guess I needed to play Fear”). On Star Wars: The Force Awakens he and Ben Schwartz were credited as BB-8 vocal consultants: J.J. Abrams ran their voices through a talkbox hooked to an iPad app, after a straight voice “sounded too human.”
Then he went straight. In The Skeleton Twins (2014) he played Milo, a failed actor who has just tried to kill himself and is reunited with his estranged twin (Kristen Wiig), and critics called him a revelation. Trainwreck (2015), opposite Amy Schumer, gave him his first romantic lead. He co-created Documentary Now! (2015) with Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers and Rhys Thomas, a series that parodies famous documentaries.
It Chapter Two (2019) is where horror comes in. Andy Muschietti directed from Gary Dauberman’s script, with James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain and Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise; it opened on September 6, 2019, ran 169 minutes and grossed $473.1 million worldwide. Hader plays the adult Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, sharing the role with Finn Wolfhard, who plays young Richie. The film makes Richie a stand-up comic (in Stephen King’s novel he’s a radio DJ), and his jokes work as a shield.
The casting has a real paper trail. During the press tour for It (2017), Wolfhard named Hader every time he was asked who should play the grown-up Richie, and Sophia Lillis named Chastain for Beverly; theirs were the only two picks that came true. Muschietti was impressed, but by the reported account he cast Hader on his own judgment. Hader has thanked Wolfhard many times. His preparation was minimal, by his own account: “I just kind of watched the first movie again on the plane on my way to Toronto.”
Muschietti and Dauberman gave the adult Richie a secret that is not there, at least not explicitly, in King’s novel: his hidden sexuality and his buried feelings for Eddie Kaspbrak. Pennywise taunts him with it (“I know your dirty little secret”). It’s set up in a flashback where young Richie is chased out of an arcade by homophobic bullies and attacked by a living Paul Bunyan statue, and it pays off in his grief when Eddie dies and in the “R + E” carving at the end. Muschietti considered having Eddie die mid-sentence (“Richie, I…”) but chose the more devastating version, in which Richie comes back to find him already dead and refuses to accept it.
The film got mixed reviews. Hader’s performance didn’t. The A.V. Club called it “by far the most magnetic” in the film and said he “picks up the whole movie, puts it in his pocket, and walks away with it.” One review called it the film’s standout performance, a comic using comedy to cope with buried trauma until Eddie’s death breaks him.
Barry (HBO, 2018 to 2023), co-created with Alec Berg, is his other centerpiece. Hader plays Barry Berkman, a Marine veteran from Cleveland who works as a depressed hitman, follows a target into an acting class in Los Angeles and decides he wants to be an actor. Berg summed up the idea as “a guy who is really good at something, but that thing is destroying him.” Hader co-wrote the show, starred in all four seasons, and directed, starting with the pilot, the first thing he had ever directed. He directed episodes like “ronny/lily” and “710N,” then every episode of the fourth season, including the finale. He won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2018 and 2019, from eight Barry nominations as actor, writer, director and producer, and three DGA Awards for directing.
He has turned to horror as a director. They Know, announced in February 2026, is his first feature as director: a psychological horror film he wrote from a story developed with Duffy Boudreau and stars in, as a divorced father who comes to suspect the mysterious man dating his ex-wife (Linda Cardellini) is having a strange influence on their daughters. Filming began in Los Angeles in April 2026. He is also developing a Jonestown drama for HBO with Daniel Zelman, which he would direct if it gets the go-ahead, and he voices the title role in Warner Bros.’ animated The Cat in the Hat, scheduled for November 6, 2026.
Cool Verified Facts
- During It Chapter Two he asked Bill Skarsgård whether Pennywise’s wandering eye was digital. Skarsgård said, “Oh, you mean this?” and did it live, in full makeup. Hader’s startled reaction was caught in set photos that went viral nearly a year before release.
- In the Neibolt House climax, when Stan’s severed head sprouts spider legs, Richie says the line Palmer says in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), “You have to be f---ing kidding.” Hader reportedly suggested it himself as a fan of the film.
- He hosted TCM’s Essentials, Jr. from 2011 to 2014, picking classic films for younger viewers.
- With Seth Meyers he co-wrote a Spider-Man comic, The Short Halloween (2009).
- He gave Chapman University’s commencement speech in May 2024 and received an honorary Doctor of Arts.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
Hader has spoken openly for more than a decade about his anxiety disorder. “I had massive panic attacks on every show,” he said of SNL, and “when I did the Stefon character, I would put my hands in front of my face because I was so nervous.” He had a panic attack live on air while playing Julian Assange in 2010: “It felt like someone was sitting on my chest.” Afterwards Lorne Michaels told him, “You can work here as long as you want.” Mulaney, who knew Hader rehearsed his lines obsessively, changed Stefon’s cue cards between dress rehearsal and air, and Hader admitted, “I have not gotten through a single Stefon update without breaking.”
He has said that SNL meant “being trapped by this thing that was hurting you,” and that he needed therapy and meditation to cope. That feeling became Barry, a man good at the one thing that’s destroying him. He has said that producing, writing, directing and starring in his own HBO show was “less stressful than being a feature player on Saturday Night Live.” When he skipped SNL’s 50th anniversary show in 2025, he later explained on Late Night with Seth Meyers that anxiety, not scheduling, was the reason.
On horror acting he is honest about his limits. He has said he smiles when he’s scared, and Muschietti kept telling him he needed to look frightened. He called himself “the audience surrogate of the movie.” His best set story is anti-heroic: “Everyone did their own stunts on this movie… I had to run 10 feet, and I pulled my groin muscle,” fleeing a clown spider while castmates did barrel rolls, which earned him an MRI from a Canadian doctor.
He described directing every episode of Barry’s last season this way: “for nine years I had my fist clenched as tight as it possibly could go.” Mulaney calls Hader’s knowledge of film and comedy “insane, voluminous and complete.”
Why He Matters
Bill Hader’s path is unusually clean: a production assistant who wanted to direct, spotted at a backyard show, eight years as SNL’s impressions man, then a dramatic lead, a romantic lead, a horror standout and finally the creator, writer, director and star of Barry. The credits do the arguing.
For horror, he is the comic actor who stole a Stephen King sequel by going smaller rather than bigger. Even critics who didn’t like It Chapter Two agreed his Richie was its center, making both the jokes and the grief work, and alongside Skarsgård’s Pennywise he gave 2019 horror its two most talked-about performances. Add the Vincent Price impression from a decade earlier and a first feature that is a horror film, and there’s a real horror thread running through one of comedy’s best careers.