series ‘‘Barry’’ asked Henry Winkler to audition for the role of Gene
Cousineau, they assured him that he was on a short list. Winkler said he
was willing, as long as the list didn’t include Dustin Hoff man. ‘‘Because
he’s a movie star. He’d get it. If Dustin was on the list, I wasn’t going in.
They said no. I said OK.’’
There was no particular reason to think the two-time Oscar winner
would be up for the same part, but Winkler can be forgiven for indulging
in a little paranoia. Across the span of his 50-year career, he has had some
highs — 1970s pop-culture saturation to rival ‘‘Star Wars’’ and the music
from ‘‘Jaws’’ — and lows, including a long stretch where he couldn’t get
hired, fi lled with the sense that he’d been typecast into oblivion.
‘‘Barry,’’ co-created by and starring Bill Hader, is about acting or, more
specifi cally, about a depressed hit man who comes to Los Angeles to
murder someone and decides to give acting a try. He joins a class taught
by Gene, a washed-up name-dropper — he makes restaurant reservations
as ‘‘Neil Patrick Harris’’ — who has covered the walls of his acting studio
with posters of plays he produced, directed and starred in, including
a gray-haired turn as Peter Pan. Inside his classroom, he’s a legend, a
sometimes-gifted teacher, ragingly sincere as he spurs his students to
fi nd their voice. In the real world, he’s just another out-of-work actor,
one with such serious anger-management issues that he was barred from
attending Patrick Swayze’s funeral.
In a scene that Winkler performed for his audition, Gene is running
a class in his black-box studio, instructing his star student, Sally, played
on the show by Sarah Goldberg, to dig deeper. Hader and his co-creator,
Alec Berg, watched Winkler work his way through the scene. ‘‘The part
had originally been written as some kind of drill sergeant, but Henry had
this instinct to console her,’’ Berg explained. ‘‘And even when he tried to
be mean, he has such an inherent warmth.’’
Berg and Hader started pushing Winkler himself to dig deeper.
‘‘You need to really go after her,’’ Hader told him. ‘‘Like if you’ve ever been
really angry at a person and you just want to hurt them. You want to take
her down so you can build her up. It’s how you manipulate these people.’’
‘‘Oh,’’ Winkler said. ‘‘So this man is an asshole.’’
‘‘Yes, Henry,’’ Hader said. ‘‘You’re playing an asshole.’’ With that, Winkler
locked in on the character, and the scene became more interesting.
In the episode as it was fi nally broadcast, Gene is in a fury, and Sally is
onstage. Sensing a false performance, he shouts an expletive. He says it
again, cutting her off as she stumbles through her monologue. She tries to
defend herself. ‘‘Excuse me,’’ he says, ‘‘I don’t give a [expletive]! Even your
excuses are false. You’re up there, you’re stinking up my stage, babe. What
the [expletive] do you want?’’
Finally, she mumbles, ‘‘To be an actress.’’
‘‘Again, I don’t believe you!’’
Tearing up, she says, ‘‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted in the whole world!’’
‘‘Oh, really?’’ Gene says. He turns his back to her and faces the class.
‘‘Oh, yeah, last week she takes me out for a cup of coff ee, starts to cry, snot
running down her nose. All of a sudden she says, ‘I’m not gonna make it.’
I’m telling you, I was embarrassed. It was pathetic. Here was a person who’s
spending her money, she doesn’t have any talent whatsoever. This chick
shouldn’t even be in this class. I cannot believe — ’’
‘‘That is not fair, Gene!’’ she sobs. And now, having shredded her defens-
es, Gene turns back, and in a fl ash the hostility is gone — he’d only been
acting — and he gently, kindly implores her. ‘‘Don’t think,’’ he says. ‘‘Just
fi nish the scene.’’ It works. Sally’s performance is utterly changed, it’s raw
and alive, and at the end of the scene, Gene hugs her, tells her he loves her,
apologizes for his methods, then turns to the class and says: ‘‘I want you to
create a life right here on this stage. I mean, we’re not here studying some
[expletive] TV-commercial acting! That’s not why you came to L.A., is it?
You didn’t move all the way across the country for that. This is the theater!’’
Winkler crushed it. After the audition, Hader turned to Berg and said,
‘‘He just made the part better.’’
Berg told me: ‘‘If we had cast what was on the page, we would’ve ended
up with a much smarmier, darker monster. But the balance of warmth and
pathos that Henry brings to the character through his performance — and
also just through who he is and what people know about his life story — is
so consistently perfect with the vibe of the character that they lie on top
of each other very nicely.’’
‘‘When other actors did the scene, it was pretty vicious,’’ Hader told me.
‘‘When Henry did it, it felt more personal to him, like he could’ve been
talking to himself.’’
‘‘Barry’’ mercilessly mocks the plight of actors, but it also takes the work
seriously, defending acting as a calling, as a way to address despair and as a
technique for transformation and change. Watching that fi rst season made
me rethink Winkler’s whole strange journey. It was a gutsy move for a man
who had been struggling to land a great dramatic role for 35 years to play
an actor who can’t act, trying to teach great acting. And — in a miracle of art
imitating life imitating art — it paid off. Winkler won a prime-time Emmy after
the fi rst season, 42 years after his fi rst nomination for the award, and in 2019,
the second season went on to become HBO’s most-watched half-hour show.I first met Winkler in the fall of 2019, before anyone knew that ‘‘Barry’’ was
about to go on a two-year Covid hiatus. It sounds like a long time ago, but as
I stood beside this icon of my own distant past, looking up at the apartment
building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where his parents moved
in the 1940s, it felt like a long time ago even then.
I wanted to meet there so we could talk about Winkler’s rotten childhood.
Winkler suff ers from severe dyslexia, which was undiagnosed until his early
30s, and he talks openly about his lifelong struggles with reading and math.
He even co-wrote a popular series of books for middle-school kids about
a plucky little boy named Hank Zipzer, who lives on this very corner and
whose days are fi lled with comical disasters caused by his diff erently func-
tioning brain. Winkler is the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany,
and in his talks in schools and bookstores, he always mentions them. ‘‘The
kindergartners like when I do their German accents, and the older kids like
hearing how mean they were,’’ he said. The combination of his dyslexia and
family history make for an interesting pathology, marked at once by shame
and determination. One way he copes is to stay busy, to make himself useful,
to work. So on that warm fall day, he fl ew to New York from his home in Los50 5.1.22
When the producers of the HBO