Bill Hader Goes Deep on the ‘Barry’ Finale, That Ending, Season 2, and More

Spoilers for the Barry Season 1 finale follow below.


HBO’s excellent new series Barry has concluded its first season, and things certainly did not go as planned. The half-hour comedy series from showrunners Bill Hader and Alec Berg began as the story of an extremely skilled hitman hoping to change professions and become an actor, but in the pilot Barry’s future plans got tangled up with the Chechen mob. After a number of ups and downs throughout the season, the Barry finale saw Hader’s titular character disposing of the dangerous Chechen mobsters and finally settling down to chase his dreams.


In a delightful twist, however, the episode jumped forward in time, revealing a happily content Barry in a relationship with Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and enjoying a weekend getaway with Gene (Henry Winkler) and Detective Moss (Paula Newsome). Could Season 1 really be going out on a positive note, giving Barry a happy ending?


Of course not. In a brilliant piece of plotting, over dinner Gene brought up the moment from the pilot in which Barry “improvised” a story about a guy who was really good at killing who didn’t want to do it anymore. Moss caught on, leading to a heartbreaking confrontation between Barry and the whip smart detective. In yet another brilliant twist, just as the two were about to embark on a shootout, the camera cut to inside the house—all the audience witnessed were the sights and sounds of gunshots. The episode (and season) closed with Barry crawling back into bed with Sarah and making yet another vow to himself to stop killing, starting now.


With this tightly plotted and equal parts hilarious and devastating eight-episode season now over, I recently got on the phone with Hader for an exclusive interview to unpack the events of the finale and discuss how they came together in the writers room. The showrunner/actor/writer/director revealed an alternate ending that was considered for the finale and what two ideas they came up with on the first day of writing the show that they followed all the way to the end, and also discussed the writers’ reluctance to kill off Goran.


Our wide-ranging conversation also touched on the universal themes explored in Barry about people trying to change, as well as whether Barry is at heart a good person, where that Akira Kurosawa joke came from, why Alec Berg is underrated as a director, a brief tease of Barry Season 2, and much more. If you’re at all interested in how Barry came together, and how the writers approached the endpoint of this season, I can pretty much guarantee what Hader has to say will leave you satisfied.


Check out the full conversation below.


When you were crafting the season, what were your early discussions about how you wanted it to end? Did it change significantly once you guys started writing?


BILL HADER: Yeah, yeah we had a very different ending in mind that was too far down the road. It was something that would’ve changed things a little too drastically, so what we tend to do—and we’re doing it now, because we’re writing Season 2 right now—I tend to walk in with, “Here’s a whole season.” I tend to work up, I work vertically. I go, “Here’s eight episodes,” and then Alec goes horizontally through all eight and goes, “Well that doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that? You could do this,” and Liz Sarnoff will say, “Instead of this we could do that.” And by the way, what I will initially come up with and then what the show ends up being, you can see remnants in there but it’s not the season really. I tend to work better when I’m working off of something, so it’s good to write your own version of that, sleep on it, and then look at it again and go, “Why are we wasting five episodes for this to happen? That should happen in Episode 2.” We just did that in Season 2 where I had something that was gonna happen in Episode 4 and Alec was like, “That should be the end of Episode 1,” and you’re like, “Oh you’re right,” (laughs).


The ending actually came to us—we wrote scripts for episodes 1 through 4 and had those, and then you could really feel it where we went, “Okay we’ve got this Shakespeare festival, we’re setting up these Marines, we have Moss and Cousineau and Barry and Sally and what she wants,” and it was just going, “Here’s what we know,” because we’d written the drafts for 1 through 4, and that tells you a lot. You can’t just outline it, you’ve gotta actually get in and write the drafts because then you start to go, “Oh that doesn’t work. That’s a conceptual idea. That doesn’t really work as you write it.” And you get the characters’ voices, you understand who they are—you understand that with Fuchs, the guy we’ve written isn’t that guy anymore. He’s more of a con man. Fuchs initially was like evil, and we reworked the character and made him more of a con man.


So basically, as we moved toward the end, initially Barry bought a house. In the initial version that I had written Barry had bought this “fuck off” house, and Fuchs was furious, like, “It’s not good for you being an anonymous hitman to own a big house in Silver Lake.” The party at Natalie’s, initially that was a party at Barry’s house. That was like a thing that Barry was hosting a party and then his Marine friends showed up to that party, and at that party Moss came with Cousineau, and it was this big reveal of, “Oh Jesus, Cousineau came to the party with Moss.” Then at the end of Episode 8, they’re all drinking at Barry’s house and Moss goes to the bathroom or something and she finds some sort of clue. It was all just feeling a bit too pat, it just wasn’t working.


I remember Alec said, “What if you just cut into the future and they’re out in the woods?” and I went, “Oh God, yeah! This thing should feel like one of his daydreams!” and everybody went, “Yeah!” So you don’t know if it’s real or not (laughs). Our initial thought was, “What if you did a thing that started and you went, ‘Oh this is a daydream.’ This is what he wanted. This is what he’s thought about all season, so what if you lean into that and he’s in a hammock with Sally, they’re reading their lines for The Front Page, Moss doesn’t suspect him anymore and they’re all together and it’s this beautiful thing.’” Make it feel almost too idyllic.


That’s what it felt like at the beginning. Because the midway point of the episode is very much where a more traditional show would end. The two of them in the bar and there’s a slow pull back. But then you hear the wood sounds and you’re like, “Wait what?”


HADER: Yeah I like that. I like that you go, “What is happening?” and then you go, “Wait, is this real?” (laughs). We wanted that, and then just writing those scenes, Cousineau does that Harry Belefonte thing, everything’s perfect, Barry is very much now a part of that society, and now they’re all eating dinner, and then we sat there for like two days. “Okay they’re eating dinner… Uh…” and I go, “What is it?” and we went, “Well his loose ends are tied off.” We just couldn’t figure it out. And I said, “Oh my God, it’s already there. It’s in the pilot. Barry told him his fucking story in the pilot!” and that was one of those moments where we just start high-fiving each other. Then Moss would figure it out. Initially what happens between Moss and Barry was much more brutal, but then it was more interesting to have this scene between them and then kind of leave it open-ended so you don’t know what the hell happened.


That cut was incredible. I literally gasped. The cut to the window and you only see the light from the gun shots.


HADER: Yeah that’s all Alec Berg, man. He was like, “You know what would be better? You just cut to the window and you hear the flashes,” and I’m operating that. I was like, “Can I operate the flashes?” You had a different flash for her gun and my gun, so it was this thing where Alec was like, “Faster!” it was funny. They were like, “Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have Bill do this,” (laughs). That was on a stage, and I was trying to work that.


I know you can’t confirm whether Moss is definitely dead yet, but I will say as a viewer, you guys did so much great character work and Paula Newsome gave such a great performance that I really don’t want her to be gone.


HADER: Yeah people like her so much, and people love Moss and Gene so much—which is a testament to how good Paula and Henry are—but she says it, “I’m a cop and you’re a fuckin’ murderer. It’s pretty simple man,” and I love that. All these things that he’s trying to tell himself she’s like, “You’re a murderer,” and he is! I think it’s a nice thing that people have picked up on the fact that there are a lot of these shows where crime is the release, it’s like, “Oh God, we’re getting away with this!” That’s a little how Walter White was, and I’m not criticizing it—clearly we really liked Breaking Bad. There’s some shots we lined up in Episode 6 where I’m like, “Oh God this is getting ridiculous. This looks just like Breaking Bad.” But he’s a killer. “Starting now,” there’s a lot of futility in it, but I like it when his emotions are relatable. I think that people say that a lot in their life, just not heightened to the degree of murder. Like, “I’m gonna stop drinking starting now,” or “I’m gonna stop eating sugar starting now,” or “I’m gonna be a better dad or husband now,” and that’s just not the way life is.


There’s something inherent in you that’s making it hard to change, and I think so much of the emotions of the show are very personal for me—not that I’ve killed anybody. But certain emotions you have, I mean it sounds corny but I do have a real problem with sugar. When you get older, it’s hard to change. It gets incredibly difficult to change, and I think that’s what all of these characters have in common. It’s why Cristobal is doing self-help books, or Goran wants to be a good father and family man, they’re trying to figure this stuff out.


And Hank wants everybody to get along.


HADER: He does! Because people who’ve been around a violent world like Hank has, the inverse is everyone getting along and people being positive, and you just get sick of it. You go, “God it’d be great if we could all just be friends.” It’s just hard to change.


So much of this show is heartbreaking, especially when it comes to those daydreams. As you get older you sit and think, “If I could things differently, this is how it would be, and this is what I would like it to be,” and then you have the cold snap back to reality.



HADER: Yeah, and I read something that someone said, “Oh those daydreams are so sentimental,” and I’m like, well they’re sentimental because Barry’s sentimental. He’s saccharine, you know what I mean? He comes from the Midwest, where we’re from. That’s the pinnacle of what you want, and he feels like, “Can I still get it?”


In that confrontation with Moss he says, “I’m a good person,” and she says, “You’re a fuckin’ murderer.” This may be an unfair question to you as the showrunner and actor, but do you think Barry is a good person?


HADER: Yeah I mean, the whole idea that he just kills bad people is really silly. He says it in the pilot, and especially after Episode 7 people are like, “Whoa he killed Chris, this just really jumped into a different place because before this he only killed bad people.” And I’m like, well he wouldn’t kill Taylor.


Ryan wasn’t a bad person, he says it. I think he has a flaw that he’s trying to figure out, but good and bad I don’t know if I can say that about anybody. Everybody’s kinda both. That’s the comedy/drama symbol (laughs). That’s why I always liked movies like Clockwork Orange. I saw that when I was way too young, but what struck me about that movie was Alex is just the devil, and then all the people he hurt are violent to him and you as the audience become complicit in his thing. I kinda want to see this guy get comeuppance because he’s a piece of shit, but what does that say about me? (laughs). That’s the brilliance of that movie, like, “Yeah no I wanna see him get tortured! Oh wait, that’s fucked up.” That’s the point of that movie, to me at least. It’s inherent in us, this duality. So I don’t know, I think it’s a hard thing for him. Would I wanna hang out with Barry? No (laughs). I would not wanna hang out with him. But I think he’s a guy whose life was much easier when he was living by himself and just could be emotionally shut off.


Right, and it’s a risk for him to put himself out there and become part of this community of actors, which ultimately made him happy. And that’s what makes it so heartbreaking when Moss figures it out, it’s like the daydream is over.


HADER: You’re right, it’s a hard thing for anybody to go into that. To say, “I’m really gonna look at myself.” Especially people from the Midwest. I really have to look at why I do things and what’s wrong with me, and there’s certain aspects of my personality that I really fucking hate, and then you see, “Oh wow my parents have it,” or “My sibling has it,” and then you go, “Can I get rid of that?” You can go to a therapist or someone and they go, “I don’t know if you can get rid of it, but you can manage it.” You know, “I have a temper,” or “I lie too much,” or “I drink,” or whatever it is. And I think Barry’s is that it’s very easy for him to kill people. He’s just good at it.


It’s easy to do what you’re good at.


HADER: Yeah you don’t even think about it. You don’t even consider that you’re good or bad if it comes naturally to you, and he takes it a bit for granted. Which is why Fuchs is like, “You have no idea how good you are.” But I think what was important was to unglamorize it and show violence for what it is. As a movie fan it’s a real discipline because sometimes you do wanna be like, “Oh if we’re gonna do a gun fight, I want it to be a great gun fight!” So it does take a discipline of making it real, and I’m very happy that people responded OK to that. Because there was a thing even while we were shooting it of people going, “Wait, is this gonna work? This is really violent.” After the episode aired where we shot Chris, Liz Sarnoff who wrote that episode went, “Hey I think we got away with it guys!” (laughs). Cause I was like, “People are gonna hate Barry now.” I couldn’t watch the episode, I couldn’t look at anything online, I was too much like, “People are gonna hate Barry.” I was kinda grumpy, because he kills a very, very good guy.


People responded really positively, and I think it made people appreciate the deep and dark areas that the show was willing to go. The baldness of the violence that came before laid the groundwork to underscore just how traumatic this was for Barry when he pulled that trigger.


HADER: Yeah, and I think the same thing happens with Moss. She is doing her job. Sarah Goldberg was there when we were shooting the scene on the dock, and she went, “Oh it’s so interesting the way you’re playing that. Because I would think Barry would be so terrified when he goes down and sees her there, but he’s weirdly confident that he can talk her out of it,” (laughs). I go, “Yeah he’s stupid. He thinks he can go out there and say, ‘We’re the same. Let’s just let this happen. We’re both just wanting love and life,’” and she’s like, “You’re a murderer. No. What is wrong with you?” and she’s right. I watched that and I went, “What the fuck is wrong with this guy?” So yeah, and then ending on “Starting now” is like will he ever be able to get out of this? Will he ever, ever be able to get out of this world? What you’re good at, this thing that he’s put himself in, can he escape that?


And also the Goran stuff, that was another one that the writers were all gonna explode on. It was like, “Okay so they’ve got Fuchs. So they start cutting him up with a saw? What happens? He can’t actually get cut up with a saw, right? I want Stephen [Root] back for Season 2.” Then we came up with the idea of the stocks, which that’s sometimes referred to as writing yourself into a corner but it’s funny at least. But then I think it’s what the show does really well is we enter the scene on a joke, then it kind of takes you by surprise when Goran gets it. Then Glenn [Fleshler] doing the kind of death rattle thing with his arm, I came up with that. I was like, “Do you remember Blue Velvet when the guy in the yellow gets shot and he hits the lampshade off, like he’s dead but he’s standing up?” and Glenn’s like, “I don’t remember that,” and then I kinda realized like, “Oh we’re killing his character, I’m sure he’s not in a great mood right now.”


That was hard, we didn’t want to do that because we love Glenn so much. I mean we toyed with, “What if Goran’s just hurt and in a coma and they’re waiting for him to wake up?” but it just started to feel very TV, like you don’t wanna lose this guy. That was probably the hardest decision while we were writing because we liked Glenn and we didn’t want it to happen, but every permutation led to, “But Goran would still be alive,” and Goran knows about the class, so what’s keeping him from blowing up the class right now?


Right, whereas Hank loves Barry so if he’s in charge, he’s not gonna seek him out to kill him.


HADER: Hank is for some reason in love with Barry even though Barry’s a dickhead to him. So that was a tough one. It was a thing we were avoiding while we were writing.


Would you say that was the toughest decision you had to make story or character-wise throughout the season?


HADER: Yeah for all of us, because we like Glenn and we love that character. It was really difficult.


So how did the Moss confrontation come together?


HADER: The first day we started writing Barry we had two big things. One, “What are we gonna do with the lipstick camera?” and then the writers being like, “Why did the hell did you put a lipstick camera in the car?” (laughs). I feel like on a lot of shows, and it was my instinct, the lipstick camera would not be revealed until the last episode of the season. And very rightfully so, the whole room unanimously was like, “Fuck that. I hate when TV shows do that, it feels like such a ploy and it makes the cops look like they can’t do their jobs. Let it happen in the middle of the season.” But she had this lipstick camera, and if she’s good, she’s gonna figure out it’s him. He’s on Facebook, and we would talk about how if she has an inkling that it was Barry, with all these things we’ve set up all she has to do is go online and look at that video and she’ll know it’s him. She’ll put two and two together.


Everything lines up so perfectly. Honestly in hindsight it looks like you guys crafted the entire season to a T to lead up to this, because it plays out wonderfully.


HADER: Well a lot of it too is you work backwards. Alec came up with the idea of the book having Ryan’s name in it and they discover it in Episode 6, so we went back and reshot the scene in the pilot so he gives him the book. But honestly I think all the stuff with Moss was just taking inventory, like, “Okay we have this, we have that, we have the lipstick camera, we set up that he’s gone on Facebook, he met Chris through Facebook, all she has to do is go see that he’s friends with Chris, and that Chris is friends with Taylor,” like it’s all there. It would take her—and it does—a matter of seconds if she just looked into it. The only thing we did was in Episode 7, we had her become suspicious of Barry. So it’s always like in her mind she was a little suspicious of him, but we didn’t want to play that too much because it would tip what was about to happen when they’re upstate.


That dinner scene is so beautifully constructed because Cousineau starts to let it slip, but the way it’s shot you’re in Barry’s head and by the end of the conversation you don’t know for sure if Moss caught it or not.



HADER: Yeah that was something all the writers were very keen on. I remember Duffy Boudreau being like, “You should not know if she caught on or not,” so his anxiety is like through the roof. And then she does, and I thought Alec—Alec Berg is very underrated as a director. He really went all out on this one. When we were shooting Episode 4, he had a storyboard artist with him storyboarding the opening of Episode 7 where the car flips. I think he had seen what Hiro [Murai] was doing and the pilot and thought, “I’m gonna step it up visually,” and I think he outdid himself. I love so many of the moments in it.


Yeah going into it I had no idea how skilled he was as a director. It’s fantastic.


HADER: Yeah, but like you were saying, that cut, that’s all Alec. All the visual stuff, that’s all him.


I also thought it was really funny to make Ryan the ringleader of the operation.


HADER: That actually was the very first day of writing. Alec said, “It’d be so great if we could pin all this on Ryan,” and we all started laughing. So that was always the North Star that we were headed towards. The two North Stars in the writers room were Barry has a breakdown on stage, and we pin everything on Ryan. I think initially in my thing his onstage breakdown was because all the guys died on the airfield. Chris died on the airfield. They were all shot and he was the only survivor, and then he starts crying about that because he got Chris killed. And then it was like, “Well wouldn’t it be better if he killed Chris? Wouldn’t that be more fucked up?” (laughs). It’s like, “Ooh that’s way better.”


Also Gary Kraus who plays that cop, that guy is unbelievably funny. He’s in Documentary Now!, and his run on Kurosawa, Alec wrote that and I fell out of my seat laughing.


It’s so funny. It’s not just the mention of Kurosawa, but that all the questions at the press conference are then about Kurosawa.


HADER: (Laughs) “Was Yojimbo the only movie he made?” “Oh God no.” My favorite was, “Where can we find these movies?” and he goes, “Uh I don’t have that information in front of me, but I would assume your Netflix’s, your Amazon’s.” It made me laugh so hard. Alec wrote that whole thing and called me and went, “Hey did you see Gary’s thing?” and I went, “No,” and he goes, “Watch the dailies.” I fell over laughing. By that time when we were shooting Episode 8, he would be shooting that in the morning while we were on another unit shooting something else. It got pretty spread out there towards the end.


You guys are hard at work on Season 2. Can you confirm how many episodes it’s going to be, and will it be following one story arc? Will it be causal again?


HADER: Yeah it’s eight again, I think I can say that. As of now it’s eight. You never know. And yeah it’s very causal. It’s a similar single storyline.


Who’s in the writers room?


HADER: We have Liz Sarnoff, Emily Heller, and Duffy Boudreau from Season 1, and we have a great guy named Jason Kim who wrote on Girls and then a guy named Taofik Kolade who writes on Atlanta. They’re awesome, they’re doing great. But it’s been fun. It’s been weird having the shows air while we’re writing, because everybody comes in on Monday and goes, “Hey I think they liked it!” or “Someone didn’t like this” or whatever. It’s just nice to be thinking about this world and these characters again, and what I like about television right now is—you know on Seinfeld you can’t blow up the apartment, and the Friends can’t stop being friends, but now you can do that. So it’s interesting to kind of go, “Well now these character dynamics are this,” or “Let’s get rid of this,” you can kind of shake it up a bit. That tends to be the stuff I really like, but I do appreciate that kind of Billy Wilder story structure.


Yeah the kind of classical structure to it.


HADER: Yeah as I get older—maybe I’m just becoming an old dickhead, but I start appreciating that because I know how hard it is.


And not a lot of people are doing it. I love David Lynch but not every filmmaker is David Lynch.


HADER: Yeah and when you try to do David Lynch you realize it’s a lot harder than it looks, and the reason he’s David Lynch is because it’s genuine and he’s David Lynch and you’re not (laughs).


And it makes sense to him and he doesn’t care if you don’t get it.


HADER: Yeah he’s an artist. But there’s an emotional component to his best stuff where you go, “Oh that is born out of a real emotion,” and you connect and I think it’s why people connect to it, because his stuff really is almost this collective subconscious thing. In the best art, that’s what happens. You go, “Wow that is so striking to me for some reason.” Then when people just do weird for weird sake, or “I don’t know just cause,” there was a time in my life I really loved that, but not so much anymore. Once you start doing this stuff, it’s so fucking hard just to make a thing make sense.


It’s just hard and so I really appreciate when you watch Blue Velvet or Eraserhead and you find yourself relating to parts of it, but that’s a real feat.


Or Phantom Thread, which I thought was brilliant. Again it just kind of got to this base truth about people and relationships that I had never seen done that way. I just feel Paul is a very intuitive filmmaker, but at the same time you always go, “God I can’t really argue with that. That’s just a truth.” Those are my favorite kinds of films and stories, that’s why I like reading Russian novels, which I need a full-on online study guide to understand anything but the best ones really do hit that mark.


The reason Alec put that Kurosawa thing in the finale is because he’s my favorite filmmaker, so I watch those movies over and over again for inspiration, just because you watch something like Ikiru and you go, “God, this is just a perfectly told story with just a very base finite truth about humans.”


And I think that absolutely bleeds through to Barry. It’s one thing to say all the things that you’re saying in terms of making the story make sense and specific plot points, but the precision with which you guys execute them and the specificity of character and the empathy and compassion really take it to another level.


HADER: Oh thanks man. Hopefully people stay onboard for Season 2.


Are you going to direct again?


HADER: Yeah I’m gonna direct some of the back half. If It: Chapter 2 works out, I’ll be shooting that and then going right into Barry, so we have a hiatus in the middle of the season and during that hiatus I’ll prep my episodes.