Bill Hader Snuck A Reference To It: Chapter 2 Co-Stars Into Barry Season 4
Bill Hader's "Barry" has ended, bringing to a close one of the best-directed shows on TV. What started off sounding like a silly idea — a hitman becomes an actor! — turned into a dark, disturbing, existential crisis of a series. Hader played Barry Berkman, a former Marine now working as an assassin. While on an assignment to kill a would-be-actor, Barry gets bit the acting bug and starts taking an acting class. And then things start to get very, very dark, as Barry spirals out of control and reveals his true, violent colors over and over again. Barry doesn't want to think of himself as a bad person — but he is. He kills people. And he's very good at it.
Hader, who directed the entire final season himself (and did one hell of a good job doing so), recently spoke with The Wrap about the end of "Barry," breaking down various aspects of what went down during that final season and why. In the middle of that conversation, the actor-turned-filmmaker revealed he slipped a fun little nod to some of his co-stars from "It Chapter Two" into one of the episodes.
In episode 7 of the final season, Chechen gangster NoHo Hank hires FUBAKs — four bad ass killers — to take out Barry's former handler, Monroe Fuches. Fuches has changed into a scary figure known as the Raven, and he's so good at that new gig that he's able to kill the FUBAKs and send their severed heads back to Hank. As Hader explains to The Wrap, the original idea was to stage a big fight scene involving the FUBAKs ... until he changed his mind.
'What's something unexpected?'
As Hader put it:
"With the FUBAKs, initially, forever it was going to be a giant battle. We were going to have a shootout with the FUBAKs where you saw how truly tough The Raven's crew was. There was going to be a thing at night where all the power goes out, and it was this big shootout thing. Then I sat down to write it and I thought, 'We've done this on the show before. I just don't care. What's something fun? What's something unexpected?' So I just went, 'What if they just come back and there are boxes with their heads in it?'"
It's a brilliant solution that resulted in a very funny scene of Hank opening several boxes full of severed heads. And this is where the "It Chapter Two" reference comes in. As Hader explains, "[T]he name of one of the FUBAKs, Isaiah Ransone, is a shout-out to two of my co-stars from 'It Chapter Two,' Isaiah Mustafa and PJ Ransone."
Isaiah Mustafa played the adult Mike Hanlen in "It Chapter Two," while Ransone played the adult Eddie Kaspbrak (Hader played the adult version of Richie Tozier in the film). The lesson to be learned here is that if you work with Bill Hader, he might one day name one of his characters after you. And that character might end up with their head in a box.