Do you have a favorite actor or artist? Have you ever thought about how your favorite musicians or celebrities got their start?  What are their stories? There are millions of artists and celebrities out there, and so many have great stories on how they got to where they are today. My favorite actor is Bill Hader,  and I’m going to tell you how he got his start.

 From 1999-2004 Bill Hader’s aspirations to be a filmmaker led him to drop out of college. After that,  he was found working as a production assistant and hoped he could work up to becoming an assistant director one day. He then started working as a PA on documentaries, shows, and movies which gave him barely anytime to pursue his creative ambitions. After a while, he realized comedy was the creative outlet he’d been looking for. 

On October 1st, 2005,  Bill Hader was picked to be the featured player on Saturday Night Live. After the show, he became an “impression’s guy,” hoping to be like his hero Phil Hartman. On July 19, 2012, he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series for his work on Saturday Night Live, becoming the first male in the cast to receive a nomination since Eddie Murphy in 1984. Later, he had his film debut in You, Me and Dupree in 2006, and Hader started to get a wide range of roles from being a comedian to having a serious role.

Bill Hader was married to American Director Maggie Carey and they had three children together. Sadly in 2006, Bill Hader and his wife Maggie Carey filed for divorce and asked for joint custody of their three daughters, Hannah, who was 9, Harper, who was 6, and Hayley, who was 5. Bill said in an interview that he wasn’t there all the time for his kids, and he was so sucked into work that he only saw the girl for 5 days in the summer. He ended up quitting Saturday Night Live to spend more time with his children.

In 2014 Hader starred in a role in a film called The Skeleton Twins, which won ‘Best Screenplay’ at the Sundance Film Festival. In the next year, he played the role of Fear in the animated movie Inside Out, and he was the voice of one of the dinosaurs in The Good Dinosaur. He’s played roles in quite a few shows and movies. After four years, Bill Hader co-created and starred in the HBO dark comedy series Barry, which received eight Primetime Emmy Award nominations as producer, writer, director, and actor. In 2018 and 2019, he won Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for its first two seasons. Of course, we can’t forget Bill Hader starred in the supernatural film It: Chapter Two as Richie Tozier. This film showed everybody that he could play a role outside of comedy.

In all, his life is pretty successful as an actor and director, and he’s still working in the film industry today. Bill Hader is a huge inspiration of mine. He has inspired me to get into acting and theater in hopes to be as successful as him someday.