Bill Hader 'Doesn't Understand' People 'Thirsting' After Him Online: 'They're What?'

"I think it's good to have humility, but I might have...too much of it," said the father of three

Bill Hader doesn’t quite know what to make of fans describing him as a “sex symbol.”

In an interview featured in InStyle‘s latest issue, on sale Nov. 22, the Emmy-winning actor admitted that he was shocked after a friend informed him that people on the Internet are “thirsting for him.”

“I didn’t know what that meant,” said Hader, 41. “They’re what? At the what? I don’t understand it at all. I think it’s good to have humility, but I might have…too much of it.”

PHOTOGRAPHED BY BEAU GREALY

In order to stay in shape for his acclaimed role as a hitman-turned-actor on his HBO series Barry, the actor said that he has regularly taken up exercising.

“I work with a trainer,” he explained. “It’s nice to do that thing where you start and you can’t do something and then after a month you can do, like, pull-ups. Suddenly you go, ‘Oh my God. I just did 10 pull-ups. I can’t believe I just did that.’ It’s a consistency thing. The same thing with meditation. That helps me a lot.”

But Hader admits that he still struggles with his self-confidence. “The whole confidence thing is a weird one,” he shared. “It depends on what day it is.”

The actor recently opened up about his experience with anxiety in a YouTube video for the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children that struggle with mental health.

“I never thought of it as any sort of stigma,” he told InStyle. “It was just a thing I had to work through. When I realized how bad my anxiety was, I went online to look for help, but none of it was hitting the way I was feeling. So it was kind of like, ‘Well, if someone’s feeling the way I am, maybe [the video] will help them, especially young people.'”

The Saturday Night Live veteran and father of three has learned to use his comedic side to help calm his anxiety.

“When I am ‘on’ a lot, I’ve learned, it’s because I’m nervous and I’m wanting the room to be filled with friends, so if people start laughing, I’m like, ‘OK, I’m in a room with friends,'” he said. “And then I can kind of relax and be vulnerable or mess up.”

“To me, it’s the same as walking up and introducing yourself: ‘Hi, where are you from?'” he added. “Instead I tell a joke and try to make people laugh.”