Unless someone told you ahead of time to listen for Bill Hader’s voice cameo in Her, you probably missed it. He plays a man pretending to be a woman in a phone-sex chat room, and Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) passes over him pretty quickly, settling instead on SexyKitten (Kristen “Choke me with that dead cat!” Wiig). “I took my dad to go see it and he didn’t know I was in it until the credits started rolling,” Hader told Vulture last night, at the season-three premiere of Girls, hosted by the Cinema Society.
“He was like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute — which one were you?’ I was like, ‘It’s fast and I sound like a woman. But that was me.’ And then we got the screener at home and watched it again and he again said, ‘Wait, who were you? What were you?’ It’s easy to miss, but just to be associated with such a phenomenal film … like, I got in the car [after recording] and called my wife and went, ‘I just got directed by Spike Jonze!’ It was so cool.” (The guys tried a couple of different versions, including one that was “kinda Latina.”)
Setting aside the fact that his character didn’t get any from Theodore, Hader found the movie to be very sexy. “I thought people in the theater were getting really turned on,” he said. “I’m being honest. I felt people were getting super horny during that movie. Just them having orgasms and having sex and stuff. I just felt like people were getting horny around me.” Even Dad Hader? “He just went, ‘That was very artful.’”
