Bill Hader

Bill Hader joined Saturday Night Live in 2005 and stayed eight years, which is a long time to be that anxious in public. What audiences saw was precision. The impressions were technically the best in the cast, and Stefon, the nightclub correspondent who dissolves into his own hands on camera, became the rare recurring character people quote correctly. Four Emmy nominations and a Peabody came out of that run.

Alongside it he was the reliable small part in a decade of American comedies: the cop in Superbad having far too good a night, bits in Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Tropic Thunder, Adventureland. He was also, quietly, the best comic voice actor of his cohort. Flint Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a full lead performance, and Fear in Inside Out is a small marvel of vocal panic.

What changed is that he stopped playing anxiety for laughs. The Skeleton Twins is where the drama first showed. It Chapter Two takes a character written as comic relief and plays the terror straight. Then Barry, which he created and directed large stretches of, and which spent four seasons becoming steadily less funny on purpose until it arrived somewhere closer to horror: a story about a man rewriting his own history in real time. It won him two Emmy Awards for lead actor in a comedy series, a category the later seasons actively resisted. He is now a director who acts, rather than the other way round.