How Bill Hader Moved From Porn Jokes To Romantic Lead

"Billy Joel", says Bill Hader, "is very sweet."

It's not often that a meet'n'greet with heritage pop crooner Billy Joel is part of your induction into a Hollywood rom-com but that's what Hader had to do for his lead role in Trainwreck.

In the box office hit film, in which Hader stars opposite the film's writer Amy Schumer, Billy Joel's Uptown Girl plays an ironic/unironic role in their characters' will they/won't they romance. So director Judd Apatow hooked the actors up with Joel. "Judd took us to a Billy Joel concert, of course," recalls Hader. "A bit of that though was meeting him beforehand and being like, 'We're gonna use one of your songs, thank you so much.'"

Hader isn't new to the ways of Hollywood schmoozing, despite this being his biggest film role to date. The one-time Saturday Night Live regular has slowly become known to global audiences through increasingly high profile film roles. From his small but showy turn as Officer Slater in 2007's Superbad he built up to last year's co-starring role alongside fellow SNL alumni Kristen Wiig in post-mumblecore flick The Skeleton Twins.

Along the way he's popped up in a string of Apatow productions: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, Year One and This Is 40.

So naturally, Hader was top of the list for Apatow's latest work... or close to the top... well, on the list, at least.

"I just kept trying to suck everyone's dicks."

"I've been friends with Judd for ten years now," says Hader. "And Judd was nice enough to think about me when he was doing this movie with Amy. I think I'd just moved back to LA with my family from New York, after I'd finished Saturday Night Live and Judd and I were just hanging out a lot. And I think I was on his mind or was just in his consciousness and he was doing this movie with Amy and thought, 'Oh you know Bill might be good for this.' So I read with a bunch of other people... I auditioned.

"I came in and read and thought I bombed it... 'Ah well, there goes that.' I remember I went and called my manager walking to the car after the audition, 'That didn't go well.' And then they asked me to come out and screen test with Amy in New York. We did the screen test and [pauses and shrugs] that went better. Then I wound up getting the part which was pretty cool."

That's how Hader ended up in Australia with Schumer. The two were here last month, their promotion of Trainwreck included a series of appearances on local TV. The pair oozed some serious comedy chemistry together. Hader admits that they aren't faking that chemistry on screen: "We very consciously tried to get a good rapport together for the movie 'cause we wanted to have the chemistry. I don't like a lot of romantic comedies 'cause I never buy the chemistry in them. So it was good for us to sit down with each other and hang out and talk. Mostly talk about this stuff but just also to hang out with each other. I'd go watch her do stand-up, we'd have dinners with her and her sister and Judd."

The conscious comedy coupling also led to Hader making appearances on Schumer's sketch show Inside Amy Schumer. One of those spots was an especially pervy bit with Hader portraying an adult movie star trying to break into legit acting jobs but... ummm... struggling to fully leave behind his past.

"That pizza sketch, the ex-porn actor in a pizza commercial, that came from a bit I was doing on set where I was a guy who used to be in porn who was an extra in Trainwreck and I just kept trying to suck everyone's dicks. And Amy would say 'No no no no no, this isn't one of those movies.' And I'm like, 'This isn't? No? Alright.' Then I would be in a scene and pull my pants down thinking I was supposed to get fucked and 'No no no no no, this is just a normal movie.' And then she called and said, 'Remember that bit we did? Well, we wrote it as a sketch, would you want to come and play in it?'"

Yeah, that guy's now a romantic lead. "It's very surreal," laughs Hader. "But it's nice though. It's just nice to... y'know, when you do SNL and you do sketch comedy then you kinda get lumped into a very certain type of performing. And I always wanted to... to... perform... Y'know, Lorne Michaels used to say, 'At SNL you perform and in movies you act.' Y'know, performing is you hit your mark and you're playing out to the audience and that's what we did at SNL forever. But there's very few chances that you get to act, have nuance... a lot of times you got to do that on Weekend Update [the satirical news segment on SNL], it was a little bit more intimate because it was just you and the camera.

"So I did this film The Skeleton Twins with Kristen Wiig and we had to do some dramatic acting and that was fun. So for this it was a similar thing. Y'know I looked at it as it doesn't work if I'm as funny as I was in Superbad - the movie doesn't work. So it's finding this tone and sweet spot for her. It's actually quite hard, I realised that 'Oh these romantic comedies if you do it right it's actually quite hard to get that tone right.'"

 "I look at Julianne Moore and I wanna be one of those guys."

Indeed, Hader's idols are not comedians, rather he aspires to be like the great character actors of our time, "I just want to be a good actor. So whatever I can do that I'm drawn to... y'know, like the actors that I admire like Julianne Moore. Because she could be in Nine Months with Hugh Grant then also be in Boogie Nights but then also in Safe - that's one of my favourite performances ever. She could do all these different things effortlessly. Jeff Bridges is another one. I just watched that documentary on him - the most wonderful documentary, The Dude Abides that was on PBS in the States - it just makes you realise when you look at his work overall and you think, 'God, that's just amazing work.' I watch that and I look at Julianne Moore and I wanna be one of those guys."

Hader was determined not to be typecast as the character who helped make him a household name among comedy nerds around the world, Stefon, the fey hipster clubber. Hader: "John Malaney and I write that [Stefon sketches] together and John Mulaney deserves a lot of credit for Stefon. But I always felt that... the only thing we did consciously was to not do a movie. Look, we thought about it and said we don't want to do a movie. It lives on Update; it didn't even work as a sketch that's why we ended up on Update. I appreciate it and I love it but at the same time I like that doing Skeleton Twins and doing this movie, people can say 'Ooohhh...'

"Y'know Trainwreck came along at the perfect time, y'know, 'Please let me do this', a romantic lead, something that's so different than Stefon and Skeleton Twins or the cop in Superbad or any of those things."