It’s no secret that Saturday Night Live was mentally taxing for Bill Hader — but sometimes that toll also became physical.
The Barry creator recently reunited with fellow SNL alum Seth Meyers, who joked that during their tenure on the show, Hader suffered a “relentless list of maladies.”
The Late Night host quipped on the latest episode, “The top 10 weirdest things that happened to any cast member I ever worked with were all Bill Hader.”
Hader, who burst into laughter at the declaration, couldn’t disagree, admitting that his anxiety has led to shingles, panic attacks, migraines, and — in one very scary moment — vision loss.
The latter incident occurred during Hader’s very first season in the middle of SNL‘s yearly Christmas episode. The comedian was just about to walk out on stage for a sketch starring Johnny Knoxville and musical guest Neil Young when he realized something was very wrong.
“I’m really anxious. I’m muttering to myself, freaking out. And then my vision goes,” Hader recalled. He explained that the issue was a result of his struggle with migraine aura, a neurological phenomenon that causes sensory changes. In his case, this meant he suddenly couldn’t see anything.
NBC
Jason Sudeikis and Bill Hader in the “Appalachian Emergency Room: Christmastime” sketch on “SNL”
At that point, Hader was already in costume as a hillbilly character, complete with a fake dart going through his hand, for the “Appalachian Emergency Room: Christmastime” sketch — and there was no going back.
“It was, like, a very SNL thing,” he recalled to Meyers. “I just went, ‘I can’t see.’ Neil Young went, ‘Awww, no. That’s too bad.'”
In the end, he stepped out before the audience with a little help from a friend and fellow costar. “I had to hold on to Jason Sudeikis and just try to figure out what my line is,” he said, joking, “Jason is like, ‘I’ll take your lines, buddy, don’t you worry.'”
But Hader added that Sudeikis actually did come to his rescue. “Jason really helped me out there — he was very sweet,” Hader said. “He put me on my mark and everything — I couldn’t see anything.”
Hader managed to make it through the sketch before one of the show’s nurses came over to help him. “Afterwards, I was sitting there with ice on the back of my head,” he recounted. “I was out of it and I was like, ‘What’s going on in the show?’ And the nurse was like, ‘Oh, they just did this pre-taped thing with Andy [Samberg] and Chris Parnell rapping about the Chronicles of Narnia.'”
Maya Dehlin Spach/FilmMagic
Bill Hader in February 2025
That pre-taped stand-in turned out to be “Lazy Sunday,” the massively successful Lonely Island sketch that thrust the trio of Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone into the public eye when it blew up on YouTube in 2005.
“It invented YouTube or whatever!” Hader exclaimed in his late-night interview. “It was one of the biggest shows ever!”
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Hader’s bouts with anxiety didn’t keep him from thriving on SNL. He went on to star on the show for eight seasons, earning two Emmy nominations during his tenure before departing in 2013. He would later return as a host and for cameo appearances, earning two more Emmy nominations for his work as a guest star.
In the years since, the Barry star has opened up about the stress that came with his time on the weekly sketch show, saying he frequently experienced panic attacks and migraines.
“When I was on SNL, I was a bit of a basket case,” he told Variety in 2019. “It could not have been easy on my wife at the time. I was so consumed with work and anxiety. Sometimes I felt like people thought, ‘Oh, he’s just wanting attention or something.’ It was like, ‘No, man, I’m legit. I’m freaking out right now.'”
Watch Hader run down his list of SNL-related maladies in the interview above.
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