Why we all love “Somebody Somewhere” star Jeff Hiller: “Everybody feels like they’re the outsider”

Jeff Hiller is a lithe and generous conversationalist – bright, quick-witted, and effortlessly hilarious. A stranger quickly feels like a friend in the “Somebody Somewhere” star’s presence, making his breakout presence understandable. Loving this frustratingly hidden gem means loving Bridget Everett‘s Sam and, equally, her stalwart friendship with Hiller’s Joel.

Joel is a fantasy version of a best friend, especially in the first season when Sam is still grieving her sister Holly’s death. Her loss still colors Season 2, but the joy in their lives is a lot brighter. For the show’s return, Sam is settling into her Kansas life, contending with aging parents and rebuilding her relationship with her other sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) and with Joel at her side, making an effort to get in her 10,000 steps every day.

Joel’s also moving forward from a recently ended relationship, mainly by joining himself at Sam’s hip. “No new people!” she tells him before one of their walks.

Best friends can grow unhealthily close, something the recently debuted second season began to wink in the second episode’s closing scene, a “can’t unsee it” physical comedy sequence where Sam and Joel share a phone conversation during a bout of, shall we say, mutual gastrointestinal distress.

By some miracle, this extreme toilet humor doesn’t cheapen anything that comes before it in the episode cheekily titled “#2.”

Where the roar enveloping Sunday night neighbors “Succession” and “Barry” is related to the former’s conversational excess and the latter’s technical athletics, naturalism distinguishes “Somebody Somewhere.” Manhattan, Kansas is the inverse of its New York cousin – sunny, warm, roomy and welcoming, a place we’d envision producing someone like Joel.

Hiller feels that way about him, too. Before “Somebody Somewhere” came his way, the actor played a slew of outrageously unpleasant people. (I also remembered him from one of his first movie roles in 2008’s “Ghost Town,” for reasons explained in our conversation.) Everett and the “Somebody Somewhere” writers saw in Hiller what so many casting directors didn’t, to the extent that for a time, Hiller thought they’d written Joel for him. They didn’t, but we can see why he’d think that.

“Somebody Somewhere” is one of the few shows on TV where queer characters can simply exist without justification or tension, or reduction to a stereotype. Joel’s life is fully realized apart from Sam, which becomes a problem. But much of the second season revolves around a happy event: the imminent wedding of Murray Hill’s Fred Rococo, casually announced during a poker game. 

To Hiller, all of this is relief and a blessing at a time when rights for LGBTQI+ are under assault. “I’m just really happy to be playing a character who is openly queer and also a human, normal, good person,” he said. Watch our wide-ranging “Salon Talks” conversation here, to see Hiller happily discuss the charms of playing Joel, working with Everett, and a musical shout-out that’s also a perfect match for his character.

This interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

This show was such a comfort when it premiered because we were coming out of the pandemic and here’s this beautiful show where it’s sunny and outside, and also in Kansas, which is one of those places that generally people don’t see depicted realistically on television. The second season continues that. How do you think that this season will hit people? 

It’s been a year since we’ve last seen them, and Joel and Sam are super tight, super, super tight, maybe almost so tight to the exclusion of others, which is maybe not necessarily always super healthy. Joel is ready to look around and see if he can start getting some of those other things on his dream board and keep growing, keep growing, because that’s what’s great about Joel is that he’s not afraid to say, “I think you need this. I think I need this.” I love that about him, and I want him to continue to get those vision board things.

Let’s talk about the vision board because that is such a huge part of Joel’s personality. Are there things on the vision board that have changed for this season? 

Maybe not the macro, but the micro, I think he still wants the general things that he wanted before, but now the specifics are aimed in a different way because life has led him in a different way. We’re going to all identify with that, when you look around and you’re like, “Oh, this is life after 40?” I think that he’s really honing in [sic] and realizing exactly what it is that he wants and what he wants to go and get.

Joel has this connection to a very specific song that’s a touchstone. Tell us about Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” and what that means to Joel. And, did it mean anything to you?

Well, this is one of those things, you hear stories about people writing toward the actor, and this is one of those. This is a song that means a lot to me. I wrote the song “Gloria.” Imagine, if I was just delusional. I put it on a playlist. That’s my creative element. I created this playlist called “Yes, Girl” and during Season 1, I was driving Bridget [Everett] and Murray Hill, who plays Fred Rococo, around, probably going to either Target or brunch because our options were limited during the pandemic, and that song came on and we all just wanted to sing, it was just so beautiful. If you listen to the words — the teaser has already been released where you hear Joel saying that he wants this song at his wedding — it’s not a song for a wedding, but it’s a song that has so much joy and so much release that even with the words that don’t mean anything about a union between two people, the joy is still there. 

Laura Branigan has pipes, so does Bridget Everett. When we were driving around in Season 1 and that song was playing and she was singing along, I was like, “I can’t believe I’m driving with Bridget Everett, and she’s singing this song with me!” Because I’ve been worshiping her for a little over a decade in New York City’s downtown theater community.

What is it about the connection of music in the show to its emotional story?

Bridget talks about it as another character, you know how they say New York is the fifth woman in “Sex and the City,” it’s music is the third friend in Manhattan, Kansas. The show has this mandate for authenticity. They really want it to seem natural and seem real, which is not to say that I don’t love in “Chicago” when Renée Zellweger is all of a sudden in this beautiful light wearing gorgeous costumes. I love that stuff. But this is really played for how music moves you in real life, and it is singing a dirty song in your car while you’re driving around, or just a song comes on the radio and you love it, or you have silly little chants while you’re making a drink.

Oh, yeah. Can you share that or is that a surprise?

Oh, I don’t know. I think everyone can know about the song “Teeny Tini.” It’s not a big tini, it’s a little tini, a teeny tini. It’s a martini. 

Did you all make that up?

That is a hardcore, 100% Bridget Everett original.

Some of the fun about this show is that you get to see these moments that one suspects are either callbacks to the cabaret or improvised in addition to the scripted moments. What freedom did you have to insert your personality and those improvisations into Joel?

The showrunners, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, give us a lot of leeway. We’re not changing the actual meaning of the script, but we are massaging the words to make them feel natural, to make them feel like they’re coming from our mouths. And you’re not trying to be Judd Apatow where you’re like, “Let me see this outrageous thing that’s super hilarious” because you’re wanting to continue that realness and that authenticity, but it is about making it feel natural. I think that’s the big thing. It’s not about making it feel outlandish; it’s about making it feel natural. I come from the improv world, so I think we normally think of it as being Jane Lynch being so hilarious talking about all the guys she had sex with in that show or whatever. I’m thinking of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” I don’t know why I’m going there, but I am. This is not that kind of improv, this is more like making it real, making it natural.

You studied theology as well as theater.

I did.

At Texas Lutheran [University], and those things go together.  There is a little bit of a spectacle in presenting the liturgy, right?

A hundred percent.

Did those elements of what you initially studied come back to the fore after all these other roles that you had, which of course are very different from Joel?

Yeah, exactly. But before Joel, I played a lot of mean waiters and flight attendants that took away your bag.

And Naked Guy. I do remember you as Naked Guy. 

Yes. They put that picture in my college magazine. Can you imagine? I played a naked ghost in “Ghost Town.” Good memory. When I read the script — I took this acting class and it was like, “When you’re going to get a serious regular role, it’s really going to be a role that is of your essence,” and I thought, well, crap, nobody writes roles that are my essence. I’ll never get a TV show. And when I read this, I thought, “Oh my God, this is of my essence.” So much so that I thought, “Oh, maybe they wrote this for me,” but then since then, every gay man over 40 is like, “Yeah, I auditioned for that part too.”

What would you say your essence is that you believe that Joel captures?

He’s an optimist. He’s in love with music. He believes in chosen family. He worships Bridget Everett. That sounds a little flippant, and I don’t worship Bridget Everett, but I think there is a certain type of person who can see someone who is out there and a star and say, “I know that person is a star and nobody else does, but for some reason I know it and I can’t wait until you all catch up.” I think Joel and I both feel that way about Bridget and Sam. 

I think the fact that he is a part of a faith community, you never see that. If you ever see gay plus church, it means churches hurting gay. You never see them working together. And I know dozens of, I grew up in Texas, so that’s where they mostly are, of queer folks who are members of faith communities and that is where they find their social outlet, their spiritual outlet, their friends, their chosen family. I love that this show made the bold choice to show this truth that never gets shown, ever. Not that I’ve seen at least.

That must have been meaningful for you . . . It’s one thing to say, “Hey, I am a gay man and I go to church,” and be part of a faith community. But also acting from a position of faith must have been interesting for you to take on.

Yeah, it reminded me a lot of the really cool Christians that I know that are not about the dogma and the rules and the judging, but are about this message of social justice and welcoming and love and being moral, and it’s about what’s right, not about the rules or what have you. I love that he does that. I love that he’s got this moral core and this center that is important to him and that he’s going to abide by, and then you can watch “Succession” and go the other way.

You mentioned something about the fact that this is such a different role from a lot of what you’ve played before, like the mean side character. When I was looking at this season and your recent titles, there’s Whitely in “American Horror Story,” you have a role in “Evil” and then you have this. What is it like for you to be known for all these roles who are memorable, partly, because of their outsized meanness?

I thought you were going to say “weird looking.”

No. Or Whitely, who’s on another level.

He’s more than me.

But also you as Jeff, what is it like for you to come out of doing all these roles, that you do very well and are memorable for, and then play Joel? 

I know that I’ll never have another role that’s as good as this, and I feel so grateful that I get to play it, that people are watching it enough that we can have a second season. I know this sounds a little lofty, you’re like, “All right, it’s seven episodes on HBO, calm down.” But that I am putting out this character who is a member of the LGBTQI+ community, but also a human and three-dimensional. Right now it’s not a good time to be a queer person in the United States and there’s all this distraction and laws saying queer people are going to take your kids and turn them into goblins, and I’m just really happy to be playing a character who is openly queer and also a human, normal, good person. I’ll play a serial killer again too, but my point is I love Joel, and I love that Joel is not a saint, but he’s also not a stereotype. He’s a full person.

There is a raft of legislation . . . that is very anti-drag, anti-trans, anti-queer in state legislations or state governments throughout the country, including in Kansas. The season revolves around a marriage, involving Fred Rococo, who’s found love, and it’s all about preparing for his wedding. Fred specifically says, “Look, we went and spoke to her parents. She said, ‘Look, I’m in love with a trans man. This is who I love.'” What was it like to be in those moments and filming them and knowing that it would come out?

I don’t think that we approached it as a political act, but right now the personal is political, especially the personal of these personals. And so it is revolutionary, it is political, it is an act of protest, just by showing a trans person, a queer person who are people. I think that that is sort of revolutionary and I think that it comes from a character place, a story place that this makes sense. That is what these characters would do. That is how these characters would live. And unfortunately, we live in a time where that is political. But I think it’s important too to put that out there, to show queer people who are whole and not heroes, not saints, but not evil monsters either.

And finding respite and connection and community too. People, especially right now, have to learn how to reconnect with each other. I feel like this season really explores that.

I love that. I think that everyone, be you queer or too old or you don’t fit in, everybody feels like they’re the outsider. That’s a little secret that I’m just now discovering. It’s so nice to see these folks who feel like outsiders finding each other and finding community. It fills my heart with joy, it’s like a weighted blanket.

New episodes of “Somebody Somewhere” air Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on HBO.