Bill Hader

Bill Hader's throughline across both appearances is the gap between how funny he looks from the outside and how miserable he feels on the inside, and he's not being falsely modest about it. He's genuinely haunted by performing, by pitching, by being in a room at all, which makes his Ted Danson conversation on Conan the more revealing one: two legends essentially confessing that the job they're famous for loving has always kind of wrecked them. The wrinkle is that on Scharpling's show, Hader is loose and nerdy and delighted, doing bits about David Lee Roth and a doomed Oompa Loompa meeting with zero apparent dread, so you get the comedian who clearly loves the craft even as he insists elsewhere that he wants to go home. That tension is the whole story of Barry, a show about a man who's good at something that destroys him, and the fact that Hader keeps accidentally describing his own life in those terms is either very funny or very alarming. His praise for Danson walking away from the show on his own terms feels like the thing he most wants permission to do himself.