Bill Hader has revealed that his absence at the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special was not due to a scheduling conflict, as claimed by his publicist at the time, but because of his long-running struggles with anxiety.
“Andy [Samberg] called me and was like, ‘Hey, so we’re doing this short about how, you know, everybody had anxiety...’” Hader recalled. “And when he told me that, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that.’”
Hader continued, “He’s like, ‘Why?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I’m anxious. I don’t want to do it.’”
Breaking into a Samberg impression, Hader said, “He was like, ‘Come on, man! What do you mean? No!”
Hader noted that it was current cast member Bowen Yang who played his role in “Anxiety,” Samberg’s digital short. “He was great,” Hader said.
As Meyers noted in the interview, Hader has long been open about his struggles with anxiety as an SNL cast member.
“It’s just the minute they say, ‘we’re live,’ it’s a level of anxiety I never felt before,” he said in a 2018 profile. “I was trying everything in my power to remain calm.”
In a 2022 interview he elaborated even further, explaining, ”Before shows, I would go into a bathroom that was way down this hall, go into a stall and have a full-blown panic attack, crying, the whole thing. And then I go and get in a giant banana costume."
Talking to Meyers, Hader noted that his SNL co-stars didn’t seem to struggle with their nerves to the same extent he would.
“You were never [anxious],” Hader told Meyers. “You were so calm.”
Hader recalled observing Meyers and Amy Poehler performing on the show, saying it was like they had “ice in their veins.”
“You guys went out there, and I was, like, trembling, anxious... And something went wrong, and you went, ‘Whoa, something went wrong? Well, something went wrong.’ And I was like, ‘You can just do that?’”
