Bill Hader’s Kid Booed Him Over ‘Cat in the Hat’
Bill Hader is the second Saturday Night Live alum to take on Dr. Seuss’ The Cat In The Hat, following Mike Myers’ live-action fiasco in 2003. The good doctor’s widow, Audrey Geisel, hated the Myers version so much that she swore off further Seuss adaptations that featured actual human beings. “I don’t think we’re going to do another live-action,” she grumbled after Cat in the Hat bombed with audiences and critics.
Hader is taking another crack at the Seuss character, but true to Audrey Geisel’s wishes, the 2026 adaptation will be animated. The cat will be voiced by Hader, news that thrilled, well, most of his family. “I have three daughters, and I’ve been reading it to them, and then my parents read it to me,” Hader said during this week’s Warner Bros. presentation at Cinemacon, per Entertainment Weekly. “And so I remember when I got the call about this, and I went to my kids, and I was like, ‘Hey, what do you guys think about the Cat in the Hat?’ And two of them were stoked.”
But Hader’s third child had high hopes for alternate casting. “The youngest one was like, ‘Boo! Ryan Gosling! Boo! Boo!’”
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That ship has sailed, kid — Dad is definitely doing the Cat. You’re just going to have to wait for the Barbie sequel like the rest of us.
Maybe Hader’s daughter still has a bad taste in her mouth from the last time Hader played the Cat in the Hat on Saturday Night Live. That Cat was still up for entertaining kids on a rainy day, but he also had history with their mother, Linda. In fact, could one of the children be half-feline? It’s not the kind of sketch Audrey Geisel would have approved of.
As for the new version of Cat in the Hat? It sounds like the movie is going to leap into an entirely new direction rather than adapt an existing book. Entertainment Weekly got a look at a work-in-progress trailer, featuring the Cat being wanted for a crime he didn’t commit. The movie’s true bad guy is a raucous zebra who tears up a suburban home, sort of a striped Thing One or Thing Two. The Cat teams up with a Giraffe with a Carafe and a Pig in a Wig as he presumably tries to clear his name.
“We all know the cat cheers up and brings joy to kids on rainy days. In our film, he will get his toughest assignment yet and have to up his game to keep that hat,” says Warner Bros. Animation chief Bill Damaschke. “It expands the story way beyond the book.”
Either way, Hader isn’t about to give up the lead part to Ryan Gosling, daughters be damned. “I’ve been chasing the role for years.”
