Terry Gross

I'm Terry Gross.

We're continuing our series featuring some of our favorite interviews of 2025.

I think it's fair to say that everyone who watched the HBO series Somebody Somewhere, including me, wanted actor Jeff Hiller to be their friend.

He played Joel, a sympathetic and supportive friend with a great sense of humor.

Somebody Somewhere was the big break Hiller had been hoping for for decades.

As he writes in his new memoir, if you're obviously gay but not hot, your roles are limited.

You just play the bitchy gay, which is what he played in lots of small parts in episodes of a lot of TV shows and commercials.

More recently, he played a serial killer who targets gay men in American Horror Story.

His memoir is called Actress of a Certain Age, My 20-Year Trail to Overnight Success.

Somebody Somewhere concluded its third and final season at the end of 2024.

Hiller won an Emmy in 2025 for his performance in the show.

The story is built around the characters of Sam, played by Bridget Everett, and Joel, Jeff Hiller's character.

When the series begins, Sam had returned from New York to Manhattan, Kansas, where she grew up, to help care for her sister who was dying of cancer.

After the sister's death, Sam stays in Kansas where her other sister still lives.

Sam has no friends there and has an argumentative relationship with her sister.

Sam feels so lost and rejected that she takes offense easily and doesn't realize that in order to avoid rejection, she's pushing people away.

But she becomes very close to Joel.

He introduces her to his found family of LGBTQ people and artists who secretly have a nighttime cabaret at the church.

where Joel is the pianist and has a key.

He gets her to sing again.