Bill Hader Will Use ‘Barry’ Season 4 to Tie Up Loose Ends, Then It’s Done for Good

Now in prison, Barry Berkman is plotting his next move. “So help me God, if I get out of here, I’m coming for you,” Bill Hader’s character in the HBO series Barry spits into the phone, bloodied and bruised in the first trailer for the show’s upcoming fourth season. Whatever loose ends he has to tie up better be handled soon because, after the eight-episode season premieres on April 16, the series will have reached the end of the line.

“There are still so many questions with the other characters, and with Barry — and there’s so many things unsaid,” Hader told Variety in an interview about ending the show. “What happens in Season 4 is structurally radical in some ways, but it made sense for what I think the characters needed to go through, and what I think the whole show is always kind of headed towards. You realize, well, we could pad a lot of stuff, and just make story. But if we’re going forward, it ends in Season 4.”

And it’s not just Barry who has unfinished business. There’s also the matter of his crooked former acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), his ex-girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg), his handler Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root), Chechen Mob member Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan), and Janice Moss’ (Paula Newsome) father Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom).

But Hader planned for it to pan out this way. During the pandemic, when production on the show’s third season was halted, he and co-creator Alec Berg returned to the drawing board to plan a different approach to its last 16 episodes – those two final seasons. “I’ve always kind of seen each season as a movie,” he said, having directed each episode of season four. “Like each season is two movies, or one four-hour movie. It’s like a giant story told in four parts.”

The actor compared the end of the series to his exit from Saturday Night Live, mostly in the sense that it’s not a goodbye he’ll be feeling immediately. “I was so in a daze, and I just had two young kids, a young family, and we moved to Los Angeles,” Hader explained. “It wasn’t until I was doing ‘Barry’ that I go, ‘Man, ‘SNL’ really taught me a lot of how to do this stuff.’”