One of the ways I chill out is by heading over to YouTube and watching those videos of SNL actors breaking character. I know it’s frowned upon by Lorne Michaels, but I find those moments absolutely hilarious, and watching them never fails to put me in a good mood. While there have been many guilty parties who have cracked regularly over the years (hello, Jimmy Fallon), I always come back to Bill Hader. The longtime cast member always seemed to have a hard time keeping a straight face when he was working with Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig.
Hader and Wiig always had a dynamic chemistry on SNL, and that was carried over into the 2014 film, The Skeleton Twins, which recently arrived on Netflix.
Written by Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman, and directed by Johnson, The Skeleton Twins is the story of twins Maggie (Wiig) and Milo (Hader) who, after a ten year estrangement, reconnect following Milo’s suicide attempt. Maggie brings Milo, a failed actor living in Los Angeles, back home to Nyack, New York, where he meets her husband Lance (Luke Wilson) and looks up an old lover (Ty Burrell). While Lance seems like an ideal husband, we soon find out that Maggie has had multiple affairs behind his back and is avoiding getting pregnant by secretly taking birth control pills. The baggage of the twin’s father’s suicide when they were young both weighs on them and brings them together.
The Skeleton Twins is one of those special sorts of films that didn’t do much business at the box office when it was released and was deserving of a bigger audience. It’s full of strong supporting performances from an amazing group of actors, including Wilson, Burrell, and Boyd Holbrook, but, no surprise, the movie belongs to the beautiful chemistry between Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. The duo were for so long recognized for their innate comedic work, that it’s not a surprise to watch The Skeleton Twins and be struck by just how good they are when they’re doing drama. That’s not to say there aren’t funny moment in the film; there are lots. But The Skeleton Twins is also full of emotion and pathos, and the two leads deliver those moments with as much ease as they deliver the laughs.
Odds are high that, like me, you missed out on The Skeleton Twins ten years ago. Now is the perfect chance to catch up on the film and see why Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader are two of entertainment’s most gifted treasures, comedic or otherwise. The love they have for one another as friends and colleagues shines on screen…and off.
Fantastic film. This was the movie, when it came out, that showed how much range Hader and Wiig have. It’s interesting looking back that Wiig had this, Welcome to Me, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl in 2015- and she gave fantastic performances in all of them.