Interview: Jeff Hiller on Living, Laughing and Loving Joel’s Emotional Growth on ‘Somebody Somewhere’
It’s Hiller time! While that is the name of Jeff Hiller’s website, it’s also apt in contemporary times as the actor moves into center view after receiving an Emmy nomination for the final season of the HBO dramedy, Somebody Somewhere.
Hiller has played Joel across three seasons on the HBO series, with his relationship with Sam (fellow Emmy nominee and TCA Award winner Bridget Everett) the centerpiece of the series. They’re a couple of best friends in the heart of Kansas who truly fill in the gaps for one another, gently pushing each other in the direction of personal growth and are actually fulfilled just by the presence of one another. It’s a relationship that gives weight to platonic soulmates, the two feeling more real than ever when they’re in each other’s presence. Somebody Somewhere is a series laser-focused with empathetic weight and allows its characters to have faults and misunderstandings. The audience sees Joel’s relationship with Sam have rockiness, find new love with a man named Brad (Tim Bagley), and be faced with an old bully seeking atonement for his past actions. The series is cozy without ever feeling small.
I recently hopped on Zoom with Hiller to discuss his time on the show, Joel’s growth across three seasons, and the laugh that made it into the show.
Tyler Doster: What do you think your greatest contribution to the evolution of Joel across the series was?
Jeff Hiller: God. (laughs) Well, the laugh. I don’t know, people seem to really like the laugh and I didn’t even plan to do that, so I’m always shocked by that. I think it was sort of a… what do you call that? A group mind. I think I was a part of it, and the writers and I were all sort of in a dialogue. I think that the fact that Bridget [Everett] and I… they would let us improvise after we got through the scene before they yelled cut, and in that time we would often just try and shape the characters in certain ways, ’cause the thing that Paul [Thureen] and Hannah [Bos] talk about so much… Paul and Hannah who are the show runners and the creators of the show said that oddly the more specific a thing is, the more broadly relatable it is to the world. So, we would try and really specify the characters in those little moments at the end of those little improvs where we would get to say funny things.
One of my favorite things I ever said was, “I’m high on life, I’m high on being a mother,” when I had a dog. People all the time come up to me and say, “I’m high on being a mother.” I think people are just like, yeah, that’s something I would say, but I’ve never heard that said on TV before in specificity.
TD: Yeah, there’s a universality to having that kind of specificity, I think.
JH: Yeah. It’s weird, but it’s true, yeah.
TD: You’ve mentioned many times in the past that D.D.H.D., Dreams Don’t Have Deadlines, and in the show’s beginning even related to yourself and your own life to how the show pursues this idea. So I was wondering, how do you think Joel embodies this living in the final season?
JH: Oh, that’s deep, because it’s funny. It’s like dreams don’t have deadlines. He could still fulfill some of these other dreams that he has, such as having kids or what have you, but I think the fact that he goes back to his old church where he had this community, even though he’s with this partner who he loves genuinely, but isn’t really in love with his church community, and the fact that he stands up for himself and says to go back to that is real.
I think it’s also, he is mourning not having kids and dreams don’t have deadlines, and he had a dream of having kids. Oh no, Tyler, you nailed it. I’m taking that in. I think he’s mourning his idea of how he would have kids, and it’s not necessarily that he’s not going to have that parental relationship in his life, but I think it’s not going to be in the way that he expected, which is two with the surrogate and four with adoption, and they all are different colors of the rainbow. I think he’s just mourning that path in the same way that I had to mourn the path that when I was 20 years old no one saw me drinking a seltzer in the coffee shop and said, come be in a movie.
TD: I found a post from January 2011 where you had written on Hiller Time that you were going to do Our Hit Parade at Joe’s Pub and Bridget Everett was going to be there, and you were so excited about it. I wanted to ask you how it feels to look back now after this ascension on Somebody Somewhere together?
JH: Oh, that’s so wild that you found that, I didn’t even know that was out there. That must’ve been one of the weird moments when I was updating my website. People are always saying, what was your relationship like before the show? I think they assume that we have this same relationship that Joel and Sam have, and we didn’t really know each other before this. That was the entirety of my relationship with her and doing that at Our Hit Parade.
It was so exciting then, and I think looking back on it, it’s almost like, yeah, it came to fruition. When I was doing that, it was like, this could maybe lead somewhere, this could be something big for me. I can’t believe Bridget Everett even knows who I am to ask me to do this, ’cause she was kind of really famous in my downtown circle, and it feels sort of like, wow, I thought that might be a big deal, and it kind of was.
TD: It’s crazy how the paths we take end up leading us elsewhere.
JH: I know. But also in 2011, I had already been trying to be an actor full-time for over 10 years, so everything I looked at was like, maybe this is an opportunity for something bigger.
TD: Do you think that Sam is the great love of Joel’s life, or is it Brad?
JH: I think Sam is his rock, and I don’t think that that means that Brad is any less special as his partner, but I think that Sam offers him certain things that Brad can’t, that laughter, that all-encompassing acceptance. I think as they grow, Brad and Joel will continue to deepen their relationship, but I think that Sam is not going anywhere in Joel’s life, I think he’s very much in love with her in a platonic way. Whereas if you told me that he and Brad weren’t together in 10 years, I’d be like, okay, but if you told me he and Sam weren’t friends in 10 years, I’d be like, no, you’re wrong.
TD: Coming from growing up gay in Texas, how did it feel for you personally to hear the words of Joel’s bully to him in the fourth episode? It had such a profound effect on Joel, how did that inform the rest of the season for you? I know there’s only a few episodes after that, but did that inform any choices you made over those last few episodes?
JH: Well, we don’t shoot it in order, so that was towards the end of the season, but I knew that that was happening for him, and I knew that it was a huge change in his outlook on things, and it was a huge catalyst. It was the catalyst for him to stand up for himself, because he had this big moment, and that’s what he does immediately after in the parking lot. But we shot the thing in the parking lot before and we shot the thing where he forgives the guy walking before, so it’s all this really complicated thing, when it was like, when do we have access to that church basement is basically what it was.
But when you’re shooting it like that, I guess it’s sort of like shooting a movie where you know everything that’s going to happen, and so you try to … even though you’ve already acted the final part, you act this part in order to play to that final part. It makes it a lot harder, to be honest, than it would be if you just shot it right through. But that moment was so beautiful for Joel, but it was also beautiful for me, because I was very bullied and the writers came to me and said, “If a bully of yours from your childhood came to you and said something, what would you want them to say?” I just really firmly knew that I just wanted them to say sorry, that was it, and so when he did that there was a catharsis for me too. Even though that actor was super nice and not at all a bully, but he stood in for a bunch of people from my childhood, which is nice.
TD: Yeah. Across three seasons, the audience sees Joel’s emotional growth or friendships with Sam and Fred, his relationship with Brad. Does playing someone on a show this deeply rooted in empathy push your own emotional growth in any way?
JH: Oh, that’s so interesting. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think we’re in this time in the world where empathy isn’t valued, and in fact, it’s … I mean, I saw [that] a lady wrote a book called Toxic Empathy saying that the left co-opted Christians’ good nature to do bad things like take care of poor people. I think that that is terrible, and I feel so overwhelmed by how not compassionate the world is right now, and so my way to combat that is to be more compassionate.
This guy Jeff Brawn, who’s a really great artist, made this T-shirt that said WWJD with my face on it, and it meant What Would Joel Do? I think that that’s true, I think Jeff Brawn is right. I often think, what would Joel do? ‘Cause Joel’s a better person than Jeff, and I want to live more like him. (laughs) So yeah, I think he did do that.
TD: How did it feel being performed to in episode two?
JH: It’s so funny, because I mean, I think Tim Bagley [who plays Brad] is such an underappreciated, incredible, talented performer who we’ve seen be funny 1,000 times. I just saw him in a movie from the ’90s, and he was so funny in it, but just in this tiny little role, so it has been so exciting to be able to see him show all of his colors.
In that scene, we had already seen him sing very loudly in the concert in season two, and so he was like, “I don’t know exactly how to make it why he would be shy now.” Then he was like, “I think what it is is that it’s just my emotions, because this is so powerful for me to be this raw emotionally that that’s the thing that’ll block me.” I was like, “Oh, that sounds like a good take. Yeah, that sounds great.” Then when he went there, I was like, “Oh my God, this is beautiful.” I found it so overwhelmingly powerful, his choice, and there was no acting necessary, it was just so … if anything, it was like, pull it back, Hiller, pull it back.
TD: What will you take with you from Joel and the collaborations on the show, the creation, the run of the show, what will you take the most from?
JH: Well, this was the first show where I really felt like I got to fully put my stamp on a character, and I got to really be a part of talking to the writers, talking to the director, that sort of thing. I just did this panel for SAG-AFTRA where it was a bunch of Emmy nominees talking, and they were all talking about, “Well, the important thing is to have a director that really can dialogue with you and talk to you.” I was just thinking, Somebody Somewhere‘s the first time the director really ever talked to me about … who said something to me other than just like, can you make it faster?
Because really they should be giving Emmy Awards to the people who are the co-stars and the guest stars who walk in for one day and somehow don’t look like this while the camera’s on them, because it’s so terrifying to be shot out of a cannon. You see the director over there talking to the famous person, and you’re standing here waiting to do whatever blocking that you have been told to do, and it’s terrifying.
So all of this to say, what I’m going to take away from Somebody Somewhere is being able to collaborate and being able to really think about a character, and really put in a thought about where they’ve come from, where they’re going, why they’re saying what they’re saying, rather than just what I normally would do, which is be mean to the other characters. It’s nice. It’s nice to have agency and to be able to really discuss it.
Jeff Hiller is Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for the episode “As Much as I Like Not Feeling” of Somebody Somewhere.
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