The ‘SNL’ Character That Helped Bill Hader Overcome His Anxiety

Working for Saturday Night Live doesn’t exactly seem like the best job for someone who deals with severe anxiety. Even aside from the fact that it requires putting on a live show for millions of viewers, there’s also the intense competition, the sleepless writing sessions and Lorne Michaels’ legendary mind games. 

But one of SNL’s all-time greats, Bill Hader, has been very candid about the fact that he struggles with anxiety, and even experienced panic attacks during sketches. 

Hader once described how he clung to Vanessa Bayer’s arm during an on-air panic attack, and suffered a similar episode while impersonating Julian Assange in a 2010 sketch. According to Hader, he “started shaking” and kept trying to hide his face with a wine glass. 

Hader eventually found a way to manage his SNL-related anxiety, thanks in part to Jeff Bridges, who happened to be the host of the episode in which Hader played Assange. As Hader once told Conan O’Brien, Bridges relayed his own experiences of nervousness to the young comedian, suggesting to just make his anxiety “his buddy.” Hader genuinely found the advice to be extremely helpful.

Hader’s strategy of not fighting his anxiety, which typically just makes anxiety worse, was further enabled by the creation of one specific SNL character: Stefon.

As Hader recently revealed to Questlove during the Academy Awarding winning filmmaker and musician’s YouTube show/whiskey sponcon Quest for Craft, the Barry star could “barely breathe” when he first started performing on SNL. But Stefon helped him to embrace that anxiousness, and find a way to use it in his performance, partly due to the unique nature of Weekend Update bits. 

“Because the camera doesn’t have to cut to other people, it’s just on you. It allowed you to mess around,” Hader recalled. He also noted that another Update character similarly helped him to play around with his nervousness instead of battling it. “I used to play James Carville, and I would do weird things that I hadn’t done before on the air, like with my hands. But it was all kind of the energy of being anxious, it was like taking that anxious energy, and channelling it out, and using it.” (No word if the real James Carville has ever tried imitating Bill Hader to cure help with his anxiety.)

Obviously Hader’s anxiety didn’t go away, but his habitual insecurities were further put at ease during his third year on the show, thanks to Lorne Michaels. “You know that you can work here as long as you want,” the producer randomly told Hader. “And that was his way of being: ‘Chill the fuck out,’” Hader explained.

Which is a lovely story – but of course, not everyone had this type of experience working for Michaels. 

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