Will Hines wanted a ham and cheese sandwich from the deli downstairs. It was 2006, and he was a video producer at AOL in New York City, the kind of gig that meant wrangling cables, shooting simple interviews, and shuffling endless digital files.
“There’s some British singer doing an interview on the floor below us,” his boss said. “You might as well film her.”
“I was thinking about the lunch I had to get after,” Hines recalls. “I hit record, and she starts singing, and it was unbelievably good! I was completely stunned.”
Two months later, Amy Winehouse was a global superstar. Hines went back to thinking about lunch.
Two decades later, not much has changed. Hines ’92 (CLAS) is still drifting into surreal moments and reacting with calm curiosity — case in point, crawling across the bathroom floor of a Hollywood improv theater with his friend and business partner Jim Woods, spoofing the horror film “The Substance.” After seeing the movie, they wondered what would happen if Hines took the drug at the story’s center. Weeks later, they were shooting their own short film.
“Yesterday, I shot a piece on ‘Jimmy Kimmel,’” Hines says. “I was a dentist in some sketch. They called me last minute. ‘Can you be here in an hour?’ That was my day. I canceled everything else.”
At 55, Hines has built something rare in comedy — a career based on adaptability. He’s a reliable character actor and one of improv’s most respected teachers, running what he half-jokingly calls Improv Grad School.
Hines can slip into the absurd with deadpan precision, whether playing a creepy landlord on “Broad City,” an icy district attorney on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” or a rich guy who hunts people on TBS’ “Lost” parody “Wrecked.”
The “Broad City” role was especially sweet. Hines had taught Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer at Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB) and introduced them to Amy Poehler. After Poehler became their champion and producer, “they cast me in their show, partly as a thank-you, I think.”
That role marked his first time on television and “the first of many creeps that I’ve gotten to play,” he says laughing. Why does he keep getting cast as the creep? “I’m a shy person, so when I’m at rest, I’ll stay very still and try not to betray any feelings out of what I think is politeness, but I think it comes across as, ‘What’s that weirdo thinking?’”
On “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” Andy Samberg encouraged him to improvise and even directed him to “go smaller, completely dead.” He was right, Hines says. “It was funnier that way.”
His favorite project was “Wrecked,” where he spent 10 weeks in Fiji playing an alpha-bully loudmouth jerk who hunts people for sport. “The showrunners liked having us play against our appearances. I love playing villains,” Hines admits. “It’s no problem for me. I don’t know what that says about my personality, but I love being the bad guy.” The series never found a wide audience, but Hines remembers it fondly: “The cast and crew were so happy to be working that everyone had a great time.”
