Bill Hader was close to shooting the upcoming third season of his Emmy winning HBO series Barry last year when the pandemic shut the production down. 

With the show’s filming back underway, and with about a month to go until they’re wrapped, Hader told ABC Audio what it was like to return to shooting after the forced hiatus as star, director, writer and producer.

“Yeah, at first, we were like, ‘Wait, what do we do?’ he said with a laugh. ‘I don’t know, how do I do this?’.

He recalled, “how exhausted I was. You know, just after midway through the first day and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I haven’t walked this much…I haven’t stood this much like a year and a half,” the SNL vet laughed.

That said, Hader says he feels “so lucky” to be working with fellow Emmy winner Henry Winkler and the other “phenomenal actors” in the cast.

Hader even joked he asked if he could shoot Barry “from my closet,” like he did when voicing his role as mad scientist Cyrus Strange in the animated Addams Family 2.

A fan of the Barry Sonnenfeld Addams Family movies in the ’90s, he thinks the new movie is a blast. “I mean, I think it’s a fun thing to see in a theater just because, you know, as a parent, it’s hard finding those things where you…can all go and see a movie where you actually are also enjoying it.”

He adds, “I’ve done that too, where you take your kids to the theater and you see something and you’re like, ‘Oh God, I have to sit through this.’ And this is actually really fun, from top to bottom.” 

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