Young Bill Hader Ruined ‘Titanic’ for Obnoxious Sorority Members
Minimum wage jobs stink, even if you’re Bill Hader. A few years back, he told Kevin Pollack about working as an usher at a movie theater as a young man — like any service job, it came with its share of obnoxious customers. Hader got his revenge, but it cost him.
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Hader was working at Centerpoint Movie Theater in Tempe, Arizona, a job that required him to dress like an old-timey usher with a cummerbund and bowtie. “This is 1997 or early 1998,” he explained. “At the time, I had very, very long hair and a beard, and I tore tickets.”
One night, a local sorority rented out an entire theater to see Titanic. “They were congregating in the front, and I was going, ‘Hey, you guys gotta move,’” he remembered. The sorority members ignored Hader’s request, refusing to go anywhere while they waited for the remaining sisters to arrive. “They were just being dickheads to me,” he said. “It just sucked.”
Eventually, all the sorority members arrived. “They’re like, ‘All right, let’s go everybody!’” As the sisters paraded in, Hader tore their tickets and exacted his revenge. “Enjoy the movie!” he told them. “Leo dies at the end! The boat sinks!”
As Hader tore tickets, he continued giving away the entire ending. “They go, ‘Leo doesn’t die!’ And I go, ‘No, you think he’s sleeping, but he’s frozen. The old lady? That’s Kate Winslet. She’s got the diamond that Bill Paxton’s looking for. And at the end, she throws it into the fucking water. Enjoy the movie. Fuck you.”
As one might expect, Hader’s antics earned him a visit from his manager. “He was this guy who’s kind of like, ‘Hey man…’” Hader said in a stoner drawl, eyes half-closed. “And he was like, ‘Did you just tell them the end of Titanic?’”
Yep, Hader replied.
“Oh,” slurred the manager in his stoner voice. “I have to fire you.”
Another weird moment in young Hader’s usher career? At the movie theater where he worked, patrons weren’t allowed to bring in their own food. “One time, I wasn't paying attention and a guy — this is no joke — brought a wedding cake. He had his tickets in his mouth.”
Once again, Hader got in trouble for allowing egregious rule-breaking. “Everybody was like, ‘Why do you bring a fucking wedding cake to see He Got Game?’”
“I had time to kill,” the man replied. “Do you have a freezer for this?”
“And the people at concessions were like, ‘No, get this out of here!’”
The staff couldn’t understand why Hader tore his ticket and admitted him in the first place.
“Hey,” said Hader, “he paid!”
