Most insane episode of ‘Barry’ explained

Did you finish Sunday night’s episode of “Barry” and think, “Uh — what did I just watch?”

Don’t worry. You’re far from alone.

“Barry” star Bill Hader — who co-wrote and directed Season 2, Episode 5 — wasn’t sure if it would provoke a reaction when HBO sent out early copies to the press. Then the messages started rolling in. Mostly along the lines of, “Oh my God … what the hell was that?!”

Look away if you don’t want spoilers, but the Emmy-winning HBO dramedy turned unusually violent extremely quickly with this episode. The setup came the previous week, when Detective Loach (John Pirruccello) finally confirmed that hitman Barry (Hader) murdered his former partner, Detective Moss (Paula Newsome). But … twist! Loach said he would “forget” the crime if Barry would kill Loach’s ex-wife’s new lover.

That brings Barry, in episode 5, to the home of his assigned target, Ronny (Daniel Bernhardt). Desperate to get out of the killing business, Barry has hatched a complex scheme to convince the man to save his life by fleeing to Chicago. Ronny, though, seems disinclined to heed this suggestion from a masked intruder — and he goes on the offensive, deploying his formidable taekwondo skills.

The fight between the two men is truly epic — but it’s nothing compared to the assault later launched on Barry by Ronny’s daughter Lily (Jessie Giacomazzi), a middle-school-aged master of mixed martial arts.

Lily stabs Barry with a kitchen knife; she scales a tree and jumps on a roof; she takes a bite out of Fuches’ cheek (that’s Barry’s handler, played by Stephen Root); and hisses and screams (“like a feral mongoose,” Barry says) while drenched in his blood. Barry’s battle with Ronny reignites in a grocery store where both are seeking first-aid supplies. But just as Ronny gets the upper hand in the fight, Loach shows up to shoot Ronny. And then tries to kill Barry. But the not-dead-yet Ronny lurches up to take down the cop with a roundhouse kick. And then gets shot to death as the police arrive, while Barry and Fuches make a miraculous escape.

Beyond the violence, the tense half hour held an undercurrent of emotional complexity for Barry. We talked to Bill Hader about it all.

Does Barry really think … that Ronny will just get in the car and go to Chicago and live in hiding and everything will work out?

Yes, it’s terrible. It’s a terrible, terrible idea. (laughs) … The slow reveal of who Ronny actually is was a lot of fun.

As soon as Barry walks in the door and sees all those taekwondo trophies …

I like that Barry asks, “Whose trophies are these?” On the slight chance they’re not his.

At first, because the fight was going on for so long, I thought, “Is this some sort of dream?” It was so unusual, so I would love to know where the idea came from to make this a bottle episode [industry jargon for an episode using a limited number of characters, sets or scenarios] where everyone was just fighting the whole time.

It’s a couple things. One was we had this Ronny character, and we knew we wanted Loach to have Barry kill him; but Barry is on this mission not to hurt people or kill anymore. And this has to go wrong some way. We also knew that Loach needed to go, so Barry would be in the clear. So those were the objectives.

… The second thing was that Wade Allen, our stunt coordinator, who’s amazing, said, “I know this little girl named Jessie, her parents are stunt coordinators and she can do anything.” He told me this during Season 1. So I wrote down notes before we started writing Season 2, and had this idea of a little girl in a karate uniform attacking Barry in a house. And I had her running up a tree, like a squirrel, and that was kind of it. Then we were in the writer’s room talking about Ronny and I just went, “Oh my God, the little girl, that’s his daughter. Oh this is good, OK, I can put these two things together.”

… When [the writers] read it, they liked it, but they all thought, when the little girl bites Fuches’s face, why doesn’t he just pull her off his face? Then we said, “Oh, well, he uses superglue to do the stitches.” And in the room, it was like, “What if he superglued his hands to the steering wheel?” And everyone started laughing.

I did love the part where Barry sees Ronny in the grocery store and says something like, “I have a guy literally glued to the car ready to take you to Chicago.”

(laughs) Alec Berg [the co-creator], on set, he pitched one of my favorite lines: When I see Ronny in the grocery store and say, “Hey! I’m the guy who was in your house.”