Was Amy Schumer And Bill Hader’s Australian Tour As Cringeworthy As It Seemed? Here’s A Look Inside.

Amy Schumer and Bill Hader had been in the country for three days to promote Trainwreck when my interviews were scheduled with them, at Club 23 — Shane Warne’s “boutique nightlife venue”-cum-sex den in Melbourne’s Crown Casino. They had spent the entirety of those three days attending premieres, answering red carpet questions, and churning out samey interviews with every media professional in Sydney.

I, on the other hand, had spent those three days researching their work and personal lives with the precision of a legitimate stalker, while swallowing hard lumps of anxiety — my first high-profile interviews were going to be with people I had actively fangirled over, and I was overwhelmed by fear that my inexorable awkwardness would immediately fuck it up.

Now, a few days after the end of the stars’ insane promo tour, we’ve seen the full effect such viral-bait celebrities can have on the Australian media. Though in the country for less than a week, Schumer and Hader were all over the nation’s radio, skits, morning TV, and panel shows, often being roped into little games — yep, we’re guilty too — and once even being asked to straight-up dress like Harry Potter. At her exclusive stand-up set in Melbourne, Schumer described the media coverage as “physical punishment”, and bemoaned being asked the same kinds of questions about the making of her film and feminism in general.

Soon after, Mamamia released an incredibly awkward interview that seemed to bring painful evidence to all her points, and a segment with KIIS radio presenter Matt Tilley went viral making international headlines when he suggested her character in the film was a “skank”. 

Though most fans were just excited to have Schumer breathing the same air as them, the flood of coverage also brought the creeping feeling that we’d all slightly let her down. It was as if Australia had invited the most popular girl in school over, only to have her harangued by a horde of younger siblings and drunk sexist uncles.

Almost interview I've seen/heard/read with @amyschumer while she's been in Australia has been almost incomprehensibly inept.

— Clem BastO))) (@clembastow) July 23, 2015

I’ve had my face screwed up in a pained face watching Australia’s media interview Amy Schumer. So much cringe.

— Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) July 23, 2015

Many from the media were ready to exchange their strange experiences as well. Mamamia‘s Monique Bowley and editor Mia Freedman discussed their interview flop in a podcast the day after, and laid much of the blame on Schumer herself. Was she rude? Didn’t she have more of a responsibility to play along and sell her film?

Walkley Award-winning journalist and author Caroline Overington offered her thoughts on her public Facebook page, suggesting people may have had unrealistic expectations. In her own interview with Schumer earlier this year, she claims to have had a sedate chat about “her parents’ divorce, her desire to succeed, her Dad’s decision to move into a nursing home when he was diagnosed with MS … acting, writing, and striving”.

“She certainly wasn’t bubbly and nor was she laugh out loud funny,” she writes. “But I guess I didn’t expect her to be, mainly because comedians rarely are.”

Also weighing in on the thread were Leigh Sales, who interviewed Schumer on 7.30, Mamamia‘s Rebecca Sparrow, and Clementine Ford, who offered their thoughts in what turned out to be a compelling and insightful discussion about what we can reasonably expect from people in Schumer’s position, and celebrity interviews in general.

If you’re interested in all that, I really suggest you read the comments — those women have much more wisdom and experience than myself. But if you’d like a newbie’s take: a car-crash interview like Mamamia’s seems destined to happen.

When journos are treated to rapid-fire speed dating interviews, they don’t have a chance of getting much unique and compelling discussion from anyone. Likewise when comedians are carted around for three or four straight days of talks. There’ll be a few appearances that seem worthwhile — Sales got interesting new insight from Schumer about how little she gets paid on TV, and Hader played it up for Charlie Pickering, spitting water in Schumer’s face — and there’ll be the inevitable duds.

I suspect the rest are a bit like mine: innocuous chats that may give you a fleeting snapshot into your favourite star’s life and work, punctuated by a couple of obligatory moments of total cringe.

Here’s what it felt like at the time:

Bill Hader: Newbie Leading Man, Long-Time Lovely Person

After being shepherded into two separate waiting areas by a number of women with a variety of clipboards — the idea of needing more than one clipboard at any given time is genuinely beyond my realm of understanding — I’m directed towards a small room with Bill Hader. All interviews are being filmed, and he’s sitting beneath a web of lights and microphones and cameras so dense and intricate I feel the need to greet him slightly crouched.

Hader is incredibly polite and immediately endearing, but small talk tends to fall flat: he’s super tired, just kicking his jetlag and hasn’t seen any of Australia yet due to all-day press duties. I make some crack asking if anyone’s tried to murder his dogs yet, and I still cannot discernibly tell if he understood the reference.

He kind of exclaimed a little saying “Oh, yeah!” and “Nope, I didn’t bring any dogs”, but also his face did this:

Everyone assigned these interviews is allotted ten minutes each, but that also includes all the prepping and pack down — your actual time ends up being something closer to six. So despite having a notebook full of detailed questions about Trainwreck, romantic comedies, and his eight-year working relationship with Judd Apatow, we instead spend most of the time talking about his career in general. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This is a weird time for Hader. Two years after his epic eight-year stint on SNL, his roles are more varied than ever, with voice work on giant kids’ flicks like Inside Out, writing and production credits on South Park, continuing small comedic cameos, and a serious dramatic lead in 2014’s The Skeleton Twins — a family drama in which he plays Kristen Wiig’s gay suicidal brother. Despite the enormity of that last one, many are hailing his role in the upcoming Trainwreck as a major breakthrough, and are now re-classifying him as a “leading man”.

“It’s very sweet that Judd Apatow, who has been my friend for so long, thought to put me in [this] part,” he tells me. “It’s just like anything though. I was on SNL for so long and there’s a very specific type of performing on SNL — I wanted to try more acting on film, where you can be a little more nuanced.”

This is something he’s really passionate about. Though so widely admired for his figuratively and literally animated characters and impersonations, he’s taken a somewhat haphazard course to get there. “I got known very quickly at SNL for my ability to do voices [but] it wasn’t a thing I had worked on,” he says. “I was figuring that out and I was getting offers to do a lot of animation stuff, and I love it.” Now, his move to feature film seems much more deliberate.

“Those are my favourite types of careers actually, people who got to swerve and do different things,” he says. “Julianne Moore is someone I’ve really admired. She gets to play such different types of people and go into a really dark place, but then also go play a mom in a movie, or play Liam Neeson’s wife in a movie, or an action movie. She can do it all.”

“I just wanted to get a chance to do that,” he says. “I don’t watch a lot of comedy. I enjoy comedy … but I never choose to go see a comedy. I like more serious films. I tend to gravitate towards that.”

He fanboys for a while about Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and a 1995 Todd Haines thriller called Safe, in which Julianne Moore plays a housewife struck with a terrifying, unexplained disease. He watches it at least once a year and has recently updated his well-loved old VHS. For awhile it’s just like chatting to any of the other big movie dorks in my life — until he mentions talking to Julianne in person about it and I remember that that’s just not our situation at all.

As three silent men behind the cameras tell me my time is up with a hand gesture I’ve just learned, I say goodbye, and tell Bill I hadn’t really done any of this before. He shakes my hand, holds it for a moment, and earnestly tells me he’s happy to be my first. I mentally discard half of my childhood to ensure that memory is catalogued forever.

Amy Schumer: Unexpected Icon, Completely Exhausted Human

It really can’t be overstated how ridiculous this year has been for Amy Schumer. Though she’s been a well-known stand-up comic in the US for at least the last five years, sketches from her show on Comedy Central have more recently gone viral, securing her a monumental global fan base. For her incisive work that skewers gender, sex, and social convention, she’s been awarded a Peabody, been crowned “the biggest deal in comedy right now” by Tina Fey, and been nominated for a whole swag of Emmys.

Trainwreck is not only her first lead role in a feature film, but her first major writing credit too. Her main character’s party lifestyle, relationship with her father who suffers from MS, and struggles with monogamy are all based on Schumer’s real life.

In the days preceding her Melbourne press junket, Woody Allen responded to a crack she makes in the movie saying she was a better comic than himself, and she also caused a huge fuss with both some feminist commentators and Disney by posing for a GQ cover shoot in various states of undress with characters from Star Wars. 

There was a lot to talk about.

After leaving Hader, I’m taken back to Designated Waiting Area #2 in time to overhear one of Schumer’s PR people serenade her with a ridiculously impressive version of Alicia Keys’ ‘Fallin’. With the comedian rhythmically interjecting in the song’s lulls to yell things like “Wyaaaaow!” and “Whooooph!” it feels like some kind of planned routine to keep the spirits up on what is now her third day of interviews. That makes me pretty happy until I realise that a) I have to follow it, and b) a planned Alicia Keys routine is necessary in the first place.

When I sit down in front of Amy Schumer, her head is tilted back to allow someone to ferociously preen her face with makeup. Her eyes are peeking over at me like they are heavy foreign objects which have recently been implanted in her skull.

As Schumer — very politely — covers a variety of topics she’s no doubt already talked about at length, she maintains a genuine bewilderment about much of her recent ascent. As stated in her stand-up show later than night, the fact that people like me in Australia even know who she is certainly adds to it.

“I never claim to have figured anything out,” she tells me, speaking to the autobiographical nature of the film as well as her strange new status as feminist icon. “I have no information. Some magazines are like ‘Will you do a dating tips thing?’ and I’m like, ‘I have no advice to give’. I do not know what I’m doing.”

In general, Schumer is far more comfortable talking about her work in a personal rather than political sense, and she’s definitely not purporting to be the kind of iconic feminist pioneer she’s often portrayed as. This is of course fine with me, as it provides fodder to my delusion that we’re just best friends casually chattin’ in Shane Warne’s nightclub at 10am, and saves me the indignity of trying to unpack huge ideas in six minutes under lights that encourage me to sweat through what’s probably my only classy button-up.

When discussing the controversial GQ cover — which seems especially ironic, as her character in the film works at a terrible men’s magazine — she says, “I feel good, I feel sexy, and I love Star Wars … as long as I’m authentic and myself, then that’s all I can do” and “Magazines are great at laughing at themselves.”

When we talk about the public’s reaction to her sex positivity she says, “I like feeling in control … I think a lot of stand-up comedians want to feel like they’re in control. If I’m objectifying myself, that makes me feel better in some way. It makes me feel more powerful.” (CC: Matt Tilley).

On Inside Amy Schumer, she says, “I’ve always just wanted to make people laugh and feel better, and if I have a point I want to make, it comes second to the comedy”.

That’s not to say she doesn’t make big points. Towards the end of our time together, I bring up a throwaway line in Trainwreck. After a character finds out she’s having a baby girl, Amy says, “Oh no! That’s the worst thing” — and the topic is never expanded upon. Did she mean all us women were just completely fucked?

“I think it’s so hard to be a chick, and I think we have so much more work to do,” Schumer explains. “One of the most important things Gloria Steinem [the acclaimed feminist journalist and activist] taught me is not to burn out — not to want too much change, too quickly. In our lifetimes, if we can just further the cause of being equal, that’s all we can do.”

It’s around then that this happened:

I left soon after, and her PR lady presumably went another bout of ’90s R&B.

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