When Bridget Everett emailed Jeff Hiller asking if he’d be willing to audition for her TV show “Somebody Somewhere,” he was at his desk at a temp job, trying to figure out how to work Excel. Hiller had some successes in the entertainment world at that point: He was in the Broadway musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” and had acted in TV shows like “30 Rock,” but he still needed to make ends meet.
He remembers Everett suggesting that he might not want to take the role because the production couldn’t pay him very much money. “I was like, I don’t think that’s true,” he says, launching into an unmistakable giggle I’ll hear many times over the course of our conversation. “I’m currently making $16 an hour. Can you top that?”
Then he read the script and he was shocked. The part of Joel, who becomes best friends with Everett’s protagonist Sam when she moves back home to Kansas following her sister’s death, was eerily similar to him.
“I was like, ‘I think maybe they wrote this for me,’” he says. “I was like, ‘How did she know that I was a theology major? How did she know that I was in church choir?’ But then other men have since told me they also auditioned.” He laughs again, an effervescent sound bubbling from deep inside him.
Everett, as well as creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, recognized that there was something cosmically linked between Hiller and this person they had invented. He got the part and now Season 3, premiering Sunday, marks the beginning of the end of the critically acclaimed series.
In Season 3, Joel moves in with his boyfriend Brad (Tim Bagley), another devout Christian. Their new circumstances mean figuring out the small details of cohabitation like whether to have magnets on the fridge and how to load the dishwasher, and also coincides with Joel furthering his own spiritual journey independent of his partner.
“Somebody Somewhere” changed Hiller’s life, so obviously he’s wistful to see it come to a conclusion. But he’s also grateful that it got to exist as it did. “I’m really truly just living in gratitude that it aired at all,” he says.
Everett attributes the success of the show to Hiller. “The show wouldn’t work if Jeff wasn’t playing Joel because he really is so funny and sly and so tenderhearted and heartbreaking and just everything you want to be,” she says in a Zoom interview. “And undeniable is kind of the most important thing. Jeff as Joel is undeniable.”
Hiller’s charm is also undeniable when we have rosé and share a plate of beet hummus at a restaurant near his Lower East Side apartment. Our conversation goes on many tangents — the sitcom “Designing Women,” the Oscar race, the musical “Wicked.” Hiller has enormous enthusiasm for pop culture, but when he moved to New York, it was ostensibly to pursue a social work master’s degree at NYU.
In many ways, Hiller’s early life was defined by his relationship to 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 real gay,” he says. “I know it’s shocking, I’m so butch now. But it was beyond cute bullying, it was straight up trauma.”
While he was not yet out, he associated the place with social justice.
“I think I would have probably been a pastor if I was born straight,” he says. “Or maybe, I don’t know, you can never know that.”
He had always wanted to be an actor, but after college at Texas Lutheran University, he headed to Denver to do what he called a “churchy version of AmeriCorps.” He first tried improv in Colorado with a fellow volunteer. Although he had been accepted to NYU, he never ended up going. He moved to New York on June 1, 2001. That same day he signed up for classes at Upright Citizens Brigade.
Hiller survived years of the rejection that comes with being an actor in New York, auditioning for web series in a guy’s bedroom and being turned down. “People were so mean to me when I was a kid, this is nothing,” he says, with that laugh again. “You’re not calling me the F-word? Let’s do this.”
When the opportunity to audition for “Somebody Somewhere” came along, Hiller and Everett knew each other a little. “We had each other’s emails, but not cellphone numbers,” he says, noting that he had performed in a show she organized called “Our Hit Parade” at Joe’s Pub, the music venue that’s part of the Public Theater downtown.
While the character has a lot in common with Hiller — down to the stress rashes they both have gotten or his obsession with a Vitamix — Thureen notes that who Joel became in the series was also shaped by the person they cast. “There’s something about Joel’s spiritual journey and Jeff’s understanding of that and Jeff’s way to articulate his beliefs and talk about it; that’s something that’s so special that we didn’t know going in,” Thureen says in an interview.
Hiller found that aspect of playing Joel “very healing.” He doesn’t deny that there are “s—ty church people” in the world, but he likes that the show highlights the good in the institutions. “I find it beautiful and I love that I get to present that story,” he says.
For as serious as those moments of the series can be, Everett also adds that “Somebody Somewhere” found ways to cater to Hiller’s gifts for physical comedy as well his ability to find naturalistic moments of humor.
“Jeff has a really soft hand and knows how to weave things out of a scene that are funny and fun and playful but not necessarily like a slam dunk, but collectively it makes his performance so rich and specific to him,” Everett says.
Recently, Hiller has been working on telling his personal story for a memoir due out next summer. It’s a collection of essays he describes in the vein of Mindy Kaling or Tina Fey’s literary projects. “I’ve read a ton of celebrity memoirs so I’m leaving out the boring s—,” he says. “I’m not telling you about how my great grandparents met or whatever.”
To help develop his material for the book, he performed a one-man show over the summer called “Middle Aged Ingenue.” One of Hiller’s ultimate goals, beyond going back to performing on Broadway, is to create a television show for himself. He’s currently working on that, while also fielding new opportunities that have come his way since “Somebody Somewhere.” Ryan Murphy wanted a meeting, for instance, 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 am known in a way that I was never known before by gatekeepers and by casting directors and producers.”
Everett says she wants to see Hiller in a “major motion picture, maybe a Marvel movie or something.” “I want to see if it snaps the sweet out of him, but I think it won’t,” she adds. “I think he’s going to always be a sweetie.”
Hiller has seen the types of roles he can be considered for expand since “Somebody Somewhere,” as well. “It allows me to audition for the gay boss now whereas before I would have to be the waiter, who was gay,” he says.
Those prior roles largely served as plot points for the main characters. Hiller often loved playing them, but has relished the chance to go deeper with Joel.
“I’ll gladly go back and play waiters or judges or gay bosses,” he says. “I just really loved having someone with an internal life and whose story we’re focusing on.”