“Somebody Somewhere” changed Jeff Hiller’s life. He is grateful for that

When Bridget Everett emailed Jeff Hiller and asked him if he would be willing to audition for her TV show “Somebody Somewhere,” he was sitting at his desk at a temp job trying to figure out how to work with Excel. Hiller had had some success in the entertainment world at this point: he had appeared in the Broadway musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” and had appeared on television shows such as “30 Rock,” but he still had to make ends meet.

He remembers Everett hinting that he might not want to take the role because the production couldn’t pay him much money. “I was like, I don’t think that’s true,” he says, breaking into the signature giggle that I’ll hear a lot throughout our conversation. “I currently make $16 an hour. Can you top that?”

Then he read the script and was shocked. The role of Joel, who becomes best friends with Everett’s protagonist Sam when she returns to Kansas after her sister’s death, was eerily similar.

“I thought, ‘Maybe they wrote this for me,'” he says. “I asked myself, ‘How did she know I was studying theology?’ How did she know I was in the church choir? But then other men have since told me that they auditioned too.” He laughs again, a bubbling sound bubbling up from deep within him.

Everett and creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen recognized that there was a cosmic connection between Hiller and this persona they had invented. He got the role and now season three, premiering Sunday, marks the beginning of the end for the critically acclaimed series.

In Season 3, Joel moves in with his friend Brad (Tim Bagley), another devout Christian. Their new circumstances mean they have to figure out the little details of living together, like whether to put magnets on the fridge and how to load the dishwasher, and they also coincide with Joel pursuing his own spiritual journey independent of his partner.

Tim Bagley (left) and Jeff Hiller in Season 3 of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere.”

(Sandy Morris/HBO)

“Somebody Somewhere” changed Hiller’s life, so he’s obviously nostalgic for it to come to an end. But he is also grateful that it could exist like this. “I really just live in gratitude that it even aired,” he says.

Everett attributes the show’s success to Hiller. “The show wouldn’t work if Jeff didn’t play Joel because he really is so funny and smart and so tender and heartbreaking and just everything you want to be,” she says in a Zoom interview. “And undeniable is somehow the most important thing. Jeff as Joel is undeniable.”

Hiller’s charm is also undeniable as we sip rosé and share a plate of beet hummus at a restaurant near his apartment on the Lower East Side. Our conversation covers many topics – the sitcom “Designing Women,” the Oscar race, the musical “Wicked.” Hiller has a tremendous passion for pop culture, but when he moved to New York, it was reportedly only to pursue a master’s degree in social work at NYU.

Hiller’s early life was in many ways shaped by his relationship with Christianity. He grew up in San Antonio and found solace in the Lutheran church he attended. It was “the only place where people were nice to me because I was really gay,” he says. “I know it’s shocking, I’m such an asshole now. But it was more than just nice bullying, it was pure trauma.”

Although he wasn’t out yet, he associated the place with social justice.

“I think I probably would have been a pastor if I had been born straight,” he says. “Or maybe, I don’t know, you never know.”

“I think I probably would have been a pastor if I had been born straight,” says Jeff Hiller. “Or maybe, I don’t know, you never know.”

(David Urbanke / For The Times)

He always wanted to be an actor, but after college at Texas Lutheran University, he went to Denver to work in what he called a “church version of AmeriCorps.” He tried improv for the first time in Colorado with another volunteer. Although he was accepted to NYU, he never got there. On June 1, 2001 he moved to New York. That same day, he signed up for classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Hiller survived years of rejection that comes with working as an actor in New York by auditioning for a web series in a man’s bedroom and being rejected. “People were so mean to me when I was a kid, it’s nothing,” he says, laughing again. “You won’t call me the F-word? Let’s do this.”

When the opportunity to audition for “Somebody Somewhere” arose, Hiller and Everett knew each other a little. “We had each other’s emails, but no cell phone numbers,” he says, noting that he had appeared in a show she organized called “Our Hit Parade” at Joe’s Pub, the music venue that is part of the Public Theater in the downtown is.

While the character has a lot in common with Hiller – right down to the stress outbursts they both suffered or his obsession with a Vitamix – Thureen notes that the person Joel became on the show was also shaped by the person , which they occupied. “There’s something about Joel’s spiritual journey and Jeff’s understanding of it and Jeff’s way of articulating and talking about his beliefs; This is something so special that we didn’t know before,” Thureen said in an interview.

Hiller found this aspect of the role of Joel “very healing.” He doesn’t deny that there are “pretty churchy people” in the world, but he likes that the show highlights the good in institutions. “I think it’s beautiful and I love that I get to present this story,” he says.

For as serious as these moments of the series can be, Everett adds that “Somebody Somewhere” found ways to accommodate Hiller’s gift for physical comedy as well as his ability to find naturalistic moments of humor.

Jeff Hiller went to “Somebody Somewhere” with his co-star Bridget Everett. Everett says the series tried to tap into his gift for physical comedy and humor.

(Sandy Morris/HBO)

“Jeff has a really soft touch and knows how to get things out of a scene that are fun and funny and playful, not necessarily like a slam dunk, but overall it makes his performance so rich and specific to him,” Everett says .

Recently, Hiller has been working on telling his personal story for his memoir, due out next summer. It is a collection of essays that he describes in the style of the literary projects of Mindy Kaling or Tina Fey. “I’ve read a lot of celebrity memoirs, so I leave out the boring stuff,” he says. “I’m not going to tell you how my great-grandparents met or whatever.”

To develop his material for the book, he held a solo exhibition over the summer called “Middle Aged Ingenue.” One of Hiller’s ultimate goals is to create his own television show in addition to returning to Broadway. He’s currently working on that while taking advantage of the new opportunities that have arisen since “Somebody Somewhere.” For example, Ryan Murphy wanted a meeting and cast him in American Horror Story and American Horror Stories.

“It’s like a completely different life,” he says. “I think 99.9% of the world has no idea who I am, so I wouldn’t call myself famous, but I’m known in a way that I’ve never been known before by gatekeepers and casting directors and producers. “

Everett says she wants to see Hiller in a “big movie, maybe a Marvel movie or something.” “I want to see if it takes the fun out of it, but I don’t think it will,” she adds. “I think he will always be a treasure.”

Since “Somebody Somewhere,” Hiller has also seen an expansion in the types of roles he is considered for. “It now allows me to audition for the gay boss, whereas before I had to be the waiter who was gay,” he says.

These earlier roles largely served as plot points for the main characters. Hiller often enjoyed playing them, but relished the chance to delve deeper with Joel.

“I like to go back and play waiters, judges or gay bosses,” he says. “I just loved having someone who had an inner life and whose story we were focusing on.”