Bill Hader Apologized to Vince Gilligan for Barry’s Breaking Bad Comparisons

If it weren’t for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, there may not have been Barry. Wrapping up its run on HBO with its fourth and final season, Barry is a highly acclaimed drama series featuring Bill Hader as a skilled hitman who finds a new love in acting. Hoping to put his dark past behind him to pursue his new passion, Hader’s Barry Berkman soon discovers it’s not quite so easy to walk away from that world.

The plot is virtually the opposite of Breaking Bad, wherein Bryan Cranston plays a milquetoast chemistry teacher who “breaks bad,” turning to a life of crime and building a drug empire after he’s given a lung cancer diagnosis. Even so, Barry drew a lot of comparisons to Breaking Bad, particularly with its first season. That could be because there was some inspiration from Breaking Bad that went into the creation of Barry, as Hader says in a new interview with THR. The actor confirms he even apologized to Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan over the comparisons.

“Yeah, I saw [Gilligan] and the writers at a thing and said, ‘Man, I really feel like I owe you a check.’ (Laughs.) And especially for season one. There was a joke that people were calling it Breaking Good and stuff like that. But it is true.”

Hader then described how he’d actually visited the Better Call Saul writers’ room back when Barry was still in its very early stages. He’d done this as a big fan of Breaking Bad, as he was hoping to learn from the best when it comes to how to develop a successful TV series. Hader also says he spent a lot of time hanging out with Gilligan personally.

“On a personal level, I visited the Better Call Saul writers’ room way early just to be like, ‘How do you guys do this?’ And so I just watched them hang out for a day. I also hung out with Vince off and on for a couple weeks, and we got along really well. I never watched a lot of television, but I did watch Breaking Bad pretty religiously. I was just impressed because of the propulsive narrative of that story.”

Related: HBO’s Barry Stars on the Final Season: ‘We Knew We Were Going to Mourn It’

Barry Takes a Page from Breaking Bad

Hader clarifies that Barry co-creator Alec Berg hadn’t seen Breaking Bad, though they acknowledged that there were some parallels between the two plots. As a Breaking Bad fan, Hader was also “self-conscious” about some of the other similarities from the first season, though he also feels that the show had become different enough by season two.

“So, when I started making this show with Alec [Berg], he hadn’t seen Breaking Bad, but we talked about the idea of a guy between two worlds and that propulsive narrative thing. There were also shots of us in the desert, and that kind of topography was in Breaking Bad. So, I was a little self-conscious about it, but I also think that as the show has progressed, it’s become its own thing. By the time we hit ‘Ronny/Lily’ in season two, it started to become its own weird thing.”

New episodes of Barry debut on Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.