Bill Hader: Meet Amy Schumer’s leading man in Trainwreck

PLAYING romantic lead to Amy Schumer in the hit comedy Trainwreck allowed funnyman Bill Hader to get jiggy with one of his all-time heroes.

IF BILL Hader were to keep his most cherished movie moments, one-on-one hoops with basketball superstar LeBron James would go straight to the pool room.

Playing a sports surgeon in the Judd Apatow-directed comedy Trainwreck, not only does Saturday Night Live graduate Hader get to romance comedian of the moment Amy Schumer, he just happens to be best mates with NBA all-star James.

“Amy keeps saying I came up with that scene, but I just remember Judd saying, ‘What if your best friend was LeBron James?’,” Hader recalls. “I said, ‘Oh and in every movie there’s a scene where the two guys are shooting hoops and talking about their relationships — what if we do that but LeBron doesn’t hold back?’ That was one of the most fun days.”

Play hard ... NBA superstar LeBron James didn’t hold back when shooting hoops with Bill Hader in Trainwreck.

While he had no hope of outplaying James on court, comedy is where Hader excels — his flamboyant nightclub news correspondent Stefon remains a cult character two years after Hader departed SNL.

So Hader would throw improvisational curveballs at James during Trainwreck scenes in an effort to prove he could beat the champ at something.

“Didn’t work — he knocked ’em all out of the park,” Hader laughs.

While Hader was ticking up plenty of film work during his SNL days (cop in Superbad, Andy Warhol in Men In Black 3, alien-chasing FBI agent in Paul, voice of animated inventor in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs), he — just like James — wouldn’t have described himself as an “actor” until recently.

Only the jolt of making bleakly comic 2014 drama Skeleton Twins with his old SNL colleague Kristen Wiig — the pair played suicidal siblings trying to fix their lives — convinced him.

Different vibe ... Hader tried drama on for size in The Skeleton Twins with Kristen Wiig.

“It wasn’t until Skeleton Twins that I said, ‘I think I’m an actor’,” Hader says. “My wife was like (adopts sarcastic tone), ‘Yeah, you’re an actor ... it’s been paying the bills for eight years now!’ But I couldn’t prove it to myself.

“It used to be I would do this stuff for free — coming up with characters and thinking of jokes. I used to work in a movie theatre, I used to work at a deli, I’d do all these things and just joke around. Now I get paid to do it and suddenly it’s a job. That was hard to reconcile ... ’cos I don’t like working,” he laughs.

“No, I’m joking. It’s just, you put pressure on yourself, you don’t want it to fail, you want it to be good. So SNL — I was on the show for eight years, I did about 200 episodes and I would say every single one I was a nervous wreck.”

Out there ... Bill Hader and Seth Rogen were bad cop, bad cop in 2007 comedy Superbad.

“I’ve always thought he was a handsome, romantic guy,” says Hader’s director and friend, Apatow. “You know he might have trouble getting cast in a part like that, but you know as soon as people see it, everyone’s going to want him to do those parts.

The 37-year-old, Oklahoma-raised Hader reckons he’s less permanently stressed about his film career, but still worries about making the right choices.

“I either go ‘Yes!’ — I’m impulsive, then I go, ‘Oh, should I have done that?’ Or I take too long — I get wishy-washy then they hire someone else.”

Trainwreck, in which he plays romantic leading man for the first time, is another step in his actor evolution.

Dream team .. Bill Hader on the set of Trainwreck with director Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer.

“I’ve always known he’s a sweetheart of a guy and that he’d be just as great playing something closer to himself as he would be playing insane cops in Superbad.”

Hader’s approach to Trainwreck was to play it for real, not for laughs. He told the director he didn’t like rom-coms (“Because I never buy that the two people should be together”) and was pleased to find Schumer on a similar wavelength.

“I said to Judd and Amy, ‘I don’t think I can be funny the way I’ve been funny in other things — I’ve gotta be a bit more grounded to make this work. Are you guys OK with that? Because you hired me to be funny ...’ I had to lean back a bit to make the story work.

The King ... “He knocked ’em all out of the park,” says Bill Hader of his attempts to out-comedy LeBron James in Trainwreck.

“What I was so happy about was that Amy and I work the same way — she wanted the film to have jokes, but she wanted the characters to be living, breathing, complex people.”

If the hilarious Trainwreck and Pixar’s Inside Out (Hader provided the voice of Fear) are any indication, Hader’s impulsive movie-picker is on target. And there’s little chance of going off track with the most recent film he wrapped filming — Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, due for release next year.

“It was awesome,” says Hader, a lifelong film nerd who’d love to follow in Spielberg’s directing footsteps. “He’s so amazing. I would not have to go to work that day and I would go to set just to watch Steven Spielberg work — he’s a master.”

TRAINWRECK OPENS TODAY

Originally published as Bill Hader: Meet Amy Schumer’s leading man in Trainwreck