he should have quit, hoping for some miracle
that will make him a brilliant actor. It echoes Bar-
ry’s own moment in Season 1 when he’s forced
to murder his good friend and the trauma of it
brings him to an emotional place that raises his
performance in ‘‘Macbeth.’’
Season 3 begins in a landscape of scorching
beauty, and we fi nd ourselves inside a nightmare
of Barry’s making. His only way out is through
the guidance of his beloved acting teacher, Gene,
who is then pulled inside the nightmare and is
forced to kneel in the middle of some wasteland
and beg for his life. In this faded light, Gene
looks almost burnished, the lines in his face
deeply etched as his mostly white hair blows
around. Staring up at the end of Barry’s gun,
refusing to submit, there is a depth in his hazel
eyes. Since the show began, Barry has been
unable to reconcile where he is with where he
wants to be. He wants to be a star, not a murder-
er, and wishes he could get past his unforgivable
sins, but he can’t, can’t save himself or anyone
else. But Gene won’t let him give up. If you want
another chance, he says, like a man who really
earned it, then earn it.
‘‘This season is the most intense serial comedy I
have ever done in my entire career,’’ Winkler said.
‘‘There are a lot of things that are hard to
watch this season,’’ Hader said, laughing. ‘‘It’s
kind of darker.’’ He couldn’t stop laughing. ‘‘TheDays’’ that you might wonder whether there was
anything he turned down. Five Adam Sandler
movies, including ‘‘The Waterboy,’’ in which he
played a hallucinating football coach. A mur-
dered school principal in ‘‘Scream’’ (uncredited).
He appeared on both ‘‘The Practice’’ and ‘‘Out
of Practice,’’ voiced characters on ‘‘The Simp-
sons,’’ ‘‘South Park,’’ ‘‘Bob’s Burgers,’’ ‘‘Bojack
Horseman’’ and ‘‘Robot Chicken’’; played or
voiced a Dr. Olson, a Dr. Watts, a Dr. Slocum
and a Dr. Maniac, as well as an Uncle Ralph, an
Uncle King Julien and a character called Nacho
Cheese on a show called ‘‘Uncle Grandpa.’’ He
has been involved in at least half a dozen Christ-
mas movies. He appeared in 58 episodes of the
oddball comedy ‘‘Childrens Hospital’’ without
ever understanding what the show was about,
and there was that moment back in 1995, on
‘‘The Larry Sanders Show,’’ when Jeff rey Tam-
bor’s Hank Kingsley snaps at Winkler, playing
himself, ‘‘You know you can’t just bang on a
jukebox and go, ‘Aaayy aaayy ay,’ and all your
problems disappear, Fonzie.’’ Winkler answers,
perhaps unconvincingly, ‘‘It worked for me.’’
In September, with the studio reopened, Win-
kler went back to work, shooting Season 3 of
‘‘Barry,’’ which premiered on April 24. Before
he saw the scripts, he got a note from Hader.
‘‘ ‘Uh-oh, you’re gonna have fun this third sea-
son,’ ’’ Winkler recalled it saying. ‘‘And I thought:
What does that mean? Do I end up in camoufl age,
holding a gun?’’
‘‘Henry comes to work every day like it’s his
fi rst day at the rodeo,’’ Sarah Goldberg said. ‘‘He
brings a sense of joy and occasion, and I’ve never
seen that in another performer let alone some-
one who’s been doing it as long as he has. And
he always comes in smelling very good. That’s
the thing that everybody comments on. You
can smell his cologne before you see him, and
everybody is relieved when they get there, the
aroma of Henry is here, Dad’s here, everybody
can breathe a sigh of relief.’’
The message in ‘‘Barry’’ is that you must either
grow or die and that the stage is a worthy place
in which to transform, but that it will cost you.
It’s sad and a little heartbreaking to watch Gene,
still holding out for his own big break long after
pervading feeling is, you know, ‘Wow, Jesus
Christ, oh, my God.’ ’’
‘‘All that stuff you squash,’’ Winkler told me,
back in that bus stop on Columbus Avenue, ‘‘all
that frustration, eventually you have to spoon it
out, but then you’re left with holes inside you —
from being criticized, from criticizing yourself and
believing it.’’ He said, somewhat enigmatically, ‘‘I
see myself as a chunk of Swiss cheese, and I have
spent the last fi ve years trying to fi ll all the holes
so I become a chunk of Cheddar.’’ I pondered the
cheese analogy and asked for clarifi cation. He said:
‘‘I’m getting closer. I’m not working at being. I’ve
fi nally gotten to the place where I can just be.’’
This was the power of acting. ‘‘Henry defi nitely
had some real tough moments of going to a place
that was uncomfortable for him,’’ Berg said. ‘‘But
he did an amazing job.’’
‘‘Yeah, you’re Fonzie, and then it went away,’’
Hader said. ‘‘But he did so much stuff , and great
things keep happening to him.’’ He went on
about Winkler’s lovely wife and house and fami-
ly. ‘‘This is morbid,’’ Hader said, ‘‘but Henry’s one
of those people I sometimes cry talking about,
and he’s not even dead! But you get sad and go,
‘Oh, man, this all ends.’ I think on some level, he
fi gured that out.’’ Hader laughed. ‘‘One day we’ll
fi nd out that he’s got like 20 bodies buried under
the house, but until then, I’ll be on record: I think
he’s a beautiful person.’’¦‘Henry comes to work every
day like it’s his first day at the
rodeo. He brings a sense of joy
and occasion, and I’ve never
seen that in another performer.’