Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Jeff Hiller is immediately recognizable as the best friend and truth broker Joel on the Peabody Award-winning show Somebody Somewhere. Now, Jeff Hiller loves memoirs. He has read a ton of them, and when he was offered a chance to write one, he was ready, and he knew all the traps. He didn't want to go with, "Oh, woe is me." He didn't want to do the fake out moment. Instead, his book is fully laugh out loud, yes, LOL moments, and then some really beautiful insights about his relationships, coming out to his parents and his own health issues.

The book is titled Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success. He writes, "This is a book about what it's like to be an actor who isn't famous. An actor who clawed, scraped, and fought their way to the lower middle rung of the ladder." Jeff Hiller has a sold out appearance tomorrow night at Symphony Space, but you can catch him at Bookends in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Wednesday night at 6:00 PM. Welcome to the studio.

Jeff Hiller: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Alison Stewart: So you love celebrity memoirs. What do you love about them?

Jeff Hiller: Oh, I love people's stories just in general, but when they're famous, it's even more fun, because they usually know other famous people and talk about them. I love it when they knew someone famous before they were famous, but if I'm being completely honest, when what I was really looking for in those memoirs was hope that somehow I would get to a place where I could also have enough success to be able to write a celebrity memoir.

Alison Stewart: Well, as you were thinking about them, you have a list of do's and don'ts that you don't want in a celebrity memoir. What didn't you want to do?

Jeff Hiller: I didn't want to talk about my grandparents. Nobody cares about your grandparents. Everybody wants to talk about how their grandparents were in some country and then came here. It's a beautiful story, but I just want to hear about when you won that big gold statue. Do you know what I'm saying?

Alison Stewart: You also didn't want the surprise hit, like, "Who would have known that I liked a car?" Said Oprah, who gave everybody a car? It's like one of those sort of like bait and switches.

Jeff Hiller: Yes, that's a cliche that I tried to avoid. The ones that are like, "I said no to that movie and the movie turned out to be Titanic."

Alison Stewart: What did you have in mind for your book? You had all these ideas, like, "I don't want it to be like this. I want it to be." How did you want it to be?

Jeff Hiller: I wanted it to be authentic, and I wanted it to be funny, and I think I landed on that. I wanted to tell my real story and my honest story, but I also wanted lots of jokes.

Alison Stewart: Had you written anything before like this?

Jeff Hiller: Yes. This is sort of cobbled together from several solo shows that I've done over the years, and so I Frankensteined them into a book.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's really smart. You know what works for an audience.

Jeff Hiller: Yes, I already heard the laughs are. I think at least if you have the same ears as a lot of people at Joe's Pub, I think you'll like it.

Alison Stewart: Each chapter of the book starts with a celebrity quote.

Jeff Hiller: It's the title of a celebrity memoir.

Alison Stewart: Right, and then there's a little asterisk, and you have a little piece of information at the bottom, like, Alan Cumming.

Jeff Hiller: Exactly, when they became internationally famous.

Alison Stewart: Why was that important to you?

Jeff Hiller: That's what I always did when I read celebrity memoir. I would find out when they got their big break, and then I'd get out my calculator and compare it to my age, and it was always a disappointment. That's kind of a lesson of the book and of my life, too, is that everybody's story is unique and special, and if you're comparing yourself all the time, you're going to be despairing, and you start to lose hope and become a little cynical. I don't want to live a life like that. I'm allowing people to say, like, "Whoa, this old queen didn't get a break until 45 years old."

Alison Stewart: Well, you start with a midlife crisis, actually.

Jeff Hiller: I do.

Alison Stewart: It happened around-- the worst day was 2017. It involved a lot of cookies. All right, would you--

Jeff Hiller: I did have a rock bottom in which I was numbing myself with baked goods.

Alison Stewart: What was going on that day that you decided to just eat as many cookies as you could in one, and what kind of cookies?

Jeff Hiller: That's important. Oh, Tate's cookies from bodegas. There were three different bags, unfortunately, so there was multiple options. I do like a white chocolate macadamia nut and the chipless wonders. Have you ever had those? They're really good. It's just like a chocolate chip cookie without any chocolate chips. Anyway, I'm digressing here. The point is, I had turned 40. My mom had just died. I was feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I live in a city that I can't afford. I am teaching improv and temping, and I want to be an actor and I'm not. I'm going to not feel that and instead taste this delicious sugar, butter, flour."

Alison Stewart: When did you realize upon eating that last cookie, like, "This isn't going to do it. This isn't going to do it for me"?

Jeff Hiller: Oh, I felt it on the first cookie. It was a bit of a wake up call. Of course, my reaction to it was to be unhealthy and be like, "Instead, I'll just get thin and that'll make me happy," which is sort of ridiculous, but what are you going to do? It was just how I was and eventually did lead to realizing I need to be grateful for life, just whatever life is.

Alison Stewart: You read some self-help books that were helpful to you.

Jeff Hiller: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Which ones were good, and then which ones were sort of like, "Oh, meh."

Jeff Hiller: Oh, we're going to get going for the diss. I love my Pema Chödrön. I love my Brené Brown. I love my Eckhart Tolle. There have been some that didn't do it for me, but they didn't register in my brain enough for me to call them out here on the radio.

Alison Stewart: What did you like about Brené Brown? That's interesting?

Jeff Hiller: Well, I love what she says, which is you need to be vulnerable and you need to be honest about what's going on in your life. That's sort of how I've lived my whole life. I mean, for instance, there is a typo on the cover of my book.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you.

Jeff Hiller: Rather than deny it or pretend it's not there or get out a Sharpie and write an R on the side of every spine of my book, I'm just owning it. It says actress of a cetain age on the cover of my book.

Alison Stewart: It does. I'm showing them, a cetain age.

Jeff Hiller: It's a cetain age, which I have learned. Cetain is a product that keeps nitrogen in your fertilizer. I think that, I don't know, there's a metaphor there somewhere.

Alison Stewart: It's so great that you pointed out on your Instagram. I mean, and it's funny because the responses, people are, one, they love you for doing that. They respond like, "I had a typo in my resume that went to wherever. My book's got a ton of typos. I had a bad pie. Oh, it was terrible." It made me feel so good, like that somebody else had a same situation and you have to just kind of own it.

Jeff Hiller: You just have to own it. What are you going to do? I can't change it at this point. Literally, if you order it, this is the book you will get. Rather than, you know, having an environmental disaster where we re-pulp books, we're just going to somehow be okay with it. That's what life is like, right? You just got to shrug and keep going.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jeff Hiller. The name of his book is Actress of a Certain Age. Can you describe where you grew up?

Jeff Hiller: Yes, I grew up in Texas in the 1980s, a wonderful place for a profoundly homosexual child to develop. It was a little difficult, but I also had a really great mom, and she really helped me through what I would call sort of traumatic bullying as a child.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting because when you came out to your mom, she'd already done a bunch of research, which was so sweet. She just wanted to know more just in case this issue ever came up.

Jeff Hiller: She is a classic type A person, but also one who leads with compassion. She had talked to pastors at her church and read books and was really ready for me to say it. I just needed to say it. Finally, I did. She said, "I know."

Alison Stewart: Your dad was a little quieter about it, but he wanted to just make sure. I think you write, you just wanted to make sure you had what you needed. What did that mean to you?

Jeff Hiller: He's a man of very few words, always in life, not just around that subject. He didn't have the language to say it's okay, but he showed it with his actions and just really made me feel welcomed and loved, even after coming out to him.

Alison Stewart: Then you mentioned to somebody, you get it, get all your energy up to say, "I am also gay." You write, "He looked me in the eye and he said, 'Yes, girl, no duh.'"

Jeff Hiller: He was a waiter. I thought I'd come out and all the gay people everywhere would embrace me and we would all, I don't know, join a utopian society. It's not that way. It's more complicated than that.

Alison Stewart: It is more complicated than that. Here's a question. Did you feel that you've been playing straight the whole time?

Jeff Hiller: Oh, did I feel I had been? Yes. In retrospect, was I? No, no, no, no. The reviews were bad on my acting job of acting straight.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting, though, and you remind in the book you were a little bit of an undercover agent with straight guys and the way they talked about certain women.

Jeff Hiller: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Would you like to give any advice to women who are dealing with a certain kind of straight man? You got questions about them, you sort of think like, "Is this guy a good guy?"

Jeff Hiller: He isn't. If you have that question, he isn't. Go, run away, find a nice guy that you think is a little bit boring, and marry him.

Alison Stewart: Based on what Jeff has heard, which you have to read about in the book, which we can't talk about. Church was a big part of your life growing up.

Jeff Hiller: It was.

Alison Stewart: You say it was theatrical.

Jeff Hiller: Yes. There was a lot of razzle dazzle in the Holy Spirit. Sure. I mean, people wear robes and they go from speaking into singing. It's a thin line between that and a Liberace concert.

Alison Stewart: Wait, tell me more about that.

Jeff Hiller: Well, I just loved all the smells and the bells. I loved lighting the candles, and I loved-- there is a performance of a pastor up in front of this congregation, which is just an audience. My church had a big enough congregation that there were two services. Two show day, a matinee and an evening. I knew how to get to a church. I didn't know how to get to be an actor on stage. I sort of gravitated to that performance element of the church. I also was in love with God and felt the spirit and things like that.

Alison Stewart: Yes. You majored in theology?

Jeff Hiller: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did you decide to major in theology? When did acting take over for you?

Jeff Hiller: Well, I majored in theater and theology. In fact, in the end, I only got a minor in theology because I didn't finish Hebrew. I just want to be honest with you all. I thought I wanted to be a pastor, and I really felt called. That's the language that the church uses. I wanted to help people, and I also wanted to be spiritual. They wouldn't, at the time allow, openly gay pastors to marry, whereas they would allow openly straight pastors to marry. I thought that was a little rude.

Alison Stewart: You also mentioned that you thought you really wanted to be able to help young people, but you were bad at it.

Jeff Hiller: Yes, I was a social worker, or I worked in direct care. I worked at a shelter for homeless youth, and I wanted to help. I realized, first of all, the system is kind of set up against people to be helped. I am bad with conflict. Just a teen with a wonderful home life has a lot of conflict coursing through their system. Imagine if you'd been kicked out of your house by your parents or if you had to run away or if you had a drug or alcohol addiction. I wasn't really great at holding a case plan firm, and yes, it's best that I left.

Alison Stewart: You still have your belief in God.

Jeff Hiller: I do, yes. Oh, I do. I definitely believe in spirituality and connection and community and compassion. All of those are the things that I learned from my church community growing up. I'm not sure that I necessarily believe in the institutionalized church.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jeff Hiller. The name of his book is Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success. All right, you decide you're going to be an actor, you're going to move to New York. You have to find an apartment. After all of the apartment searching you do, what did you learn about New York? What did searching for an apartment teach you about New York?

Jeff Hiller: Well, practically, pay for the broker. Impractically, you really got to want to live here. That's why New Yorkers are cool people, because they want to live here and they do all of the work to make it happen, which is impressive. Even if you live in New Jersey and listen to this, please come out to Ridgewood.

Alison Stewart: Come to Ridgewood, New Jersey to see him on Wednesday night at 6:00 PM. It's interesting because you describe, like you think you've got this nailed. You've got like, I think, it's $3,000 in your sock, like you're going to go to an open house.

Jeff Hiller: I had $1,500 in each shoe in.

Alison Stewart: In case I got one of them.

Jeff Hiller: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Wouldn't look at the other one, but when you got there, you literally found out that wasn't enough money.

Jeff Hiller: No. Everyone else was there offering even more money. I went to an open house in the West Village that over 200 people showed up for, for a 250 square foot studio apartment with no closet.

Alison Stewart: Where was your first apartment?

Jeff Hiller: It was in Harlem on 142nd Street and St. Nicholas.

Alison Stewart: What was living up there like?

Jeff Hiller: It was great. I think it's significantly more gentrified now. There was, at one point, a man who said, "It wasn't this hot till you came up here." I was like, "Oh, yes, this summer." Of course, he was actually talking about law enforcement, but I was young. I was young and naive. I had to have someone explain that to me.

Alison Stewart: Well, in describing the book, you're living up in Harlem and you and your friend decide to have sort of a quintessential New York experience. You're going to wait in line for Shakespeare in the Park. This starts at 3:00 in the morning.

Jeff Hiller: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You decide you're going to wait in line.

Jeff Hiller: That was the aim. Yes.

Alison Stewart: You encounter everything possible that can happen to somebody in New York.

Jeff Hiller: I surely did. I saw a group of wild dogs. I know that doesn't make sense, but there was a group of wild dogs. People are like, "That's not true." I swear to you, my friend Meredith will back me up. We saw two men being held up by gunpoint. I very stupidly walked between the two men and the gun.

Alison Stewart: Just hodey-do-do.

Jeff Hiller: We told a police officer downstairs and he went, "Okay." Then we got to the line at 3:00 in the morning and we were 180th in line. We found out there was another line on the East Side of the park that was also waiting. We just barely got in to see Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in the Seagull in Shakespeare in the Park, even though that was Chekhov.

Alison Stewart: That whole experience, did that ever make you wanna leave New York, or did it make you wanna stay even more?

Jeff Hiller: Maybe mid-experience, I was a little like, "Maybe I should get out of here," but once it happened, it was like, "I did that. I did that, and I'm doing this," and it made me want to stay all the more. I mean, I'm still here 25 years later.

Alison Stewart: You describe what it was like to audition as an actor in New York. You describe this one room, this sort of this evil audition room. You said that most people-- we have a lot of actors who listen, that they might actually recognize it. Describe this audition room for us.

Jeff Hiller: I haven't been to it post-pandemic, so maybe it's changed, but there was at the Roundabout Theater Company, they have this audition room that's also a rehearsal studio where the waiting room is outside, but the bathrooms are inside. You have to go into audition and you can't go to the bathroom first. I was having a moment of human distress. I had to ask Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes if I could go to the bathroom in the middle of my audition. After I did, I could hear him very clearly talking and realized, "Oh my God, he heard everything I did in here." Happy Pride, WNYC.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to read a piece of advice from your book, which is really, again, that part where it's very funny and then like really heartfelt, it says, "So if you wanted an advice on how to get an agent, mine would be this. Don't worry about the agent. The agent will come. Worry about the performing. Find places to act. Make a web series with your friends. Take acting classes and perfect your craft. Try standup or improv. Most of all, do not compare yourself with anyone else, even people who you've written memoirs, especially those people. There isn't one way to get an agent or become a full-time performer. There are 1 million ways. A career is built on longevity, not on making the top 30 comics under 30 lists. We aren't models, dancers, or professional athletes. There isn't an expiration date on performance."

Jeff Hiller: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How long did it take you to reach that point? I know there are people who haven't reached that point yet.

Jeff Hiller: Oh, yes. I mean, do as I say, not as I do. I think there was a time when I was so focused on results instead of on process, and I'm still sometimes that way, but I also really take moments to think like, "Oh my gosh, okay, I auditioned today and I didn't book it, but I really loved what I did in the audition, so I'm going to just enjoy that." I do. I enjoy auditioning, unlike most actors.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Jeff Hiller: Yes. I think that that's true for other people too. People who are artists, who aren't professional artists. If you want to paint, you can paint. If you want to perform, all you need is the mirror. I think, a lot of times, we think, "Oh, we're not allowed to do that because I don't have an agent or I don't have a gallery, I don't have a, whatever, a radio show at 1:00 in New York City," but you can talk to anybody and be a great interviewer.

Alison Stewart: What do you consider?

Jeff Hiller: Did that get personal?

Alison Stewart: That got a little personal. What do you consider your big break? When you sit back and you think, "Yes, this was my big break."

Jeff Hiller: Oh, Somebody Somewhere. Without a doubt, because even though I had done a lot before then, it's the first time I've been able to not have to temp or teach improv or do anything else. Also, it's the first time that I've really felt people in the audience in great numbers connected to it and love it. I mean, I can walk down the street just fine, but every once in a while, somebody will stop me and say, "Your show meant so much to me." That feels like a real accomplishment that I'm proud of.

Alison Stewart: In your book, there's a moment where you get to meet Tony nominee John Groff.

Jeff Hiller: Tony winner. I mean, not last night, but he has in the past.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Tony winner John Groff. What did it mean to you to meet somebody like that at that point in your life?

Jeff Hiller: Well, the story is a little deeper than that. Unfortunately, I did drool mustard down my shirt while I was meeting him. It was very exciting to meet him, but it was also mildly or profoundly humiliating.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success. Actress of a Cetain Age, if you're reading it from the side.

Jeff Hiller: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Jeff, thank you for being with us and thanks for writing this book. It comes out tomorrow. We really appreciate you being here.

Jeff Hiller: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: That is All of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.