Ali Wong Shares How Bill Hader Wooed Her Post-Divorce: “I Did Fall in Love Again”

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It may be called “Single Lady,” but Ali Wong’s fourth Netflix special, which debuted on Netflix October 8, is bookended by her love story with Bill Hader. Following the end of her eight-year marriage to Justin Hakuta in 2022, Wong and Hader briefly dated before confirming their relationship in April 2023. Since then, the couple has attended the Golden Globes and Emmys where Wang won respective awards for her performance in Netflix’s Beef, together.

At the start of her new special, Wong says she was surprised over the interest in her split from Hakuta, with whom she shares two children. “I didn’t expect the news of my divorce to be so widespread and public,” Wong begins. “I felt really embarrassed and ashamed, but I didn’t realize that all of these media outlets were acting like a bat signal letting all potentially interested men know—I’ve never been pursued this much in my life.”

One such suitor contacted the comedian after they had “met at, like, two dinner parties in the past.” Once he obtained her number from a mutual friend and colleague, the man—whom Wong later reveals to be Hader—professed his feelings. “Hey, Ali. I just happened to hear the news of your divorce today, and I gotta tell you…I’m excited,” Wong recalls Hader saying. “I am, Ali, because, look, I have had a crush on you forever, and I actually told my best friend years ago that you were my dream girl. And I know this sounds crazy, but, uh, I want you to be my girlfriend.”

The only problem? Wong had just joined a dating app the day prior. “And I was like…. ‘I just paid $250. You seem really nice, but I gotta get my money’s worth,’” she jokes.

“Shortly after that phone call, I take off to Europe,” Wong continues. “I arrive in London and discovered that this man had sent me a bouquet of flowers.” Increasingly elaborate floral arrangements then met Wong in Amsterdam, Cologne, and Copenhagen. “I told all my girlfriends and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, that is so sweet. I am so jealous,’” says Wong. But when she told her male friends, “they were like, ‘That dude sounds like a psychopath.’ That’s how cheap and lazy men have become—that now when a fellow man commits any act of kindness, any romantic gesture, it must be a symptom of an undiagnosed mental illness,” she says.

Those vastly different interpretation of Hader’s grand romantic gesture echoes a debate Hader once recounted from the writers’ room for his HBO series, Barry. During the show’s first season, in an effort to impress his acting class crush Sally (Sarah Goldberg), Hader’s Barry replaced her broken laptop. As Hader previously recalled, the show’s male writers viewed Barry’s gift as romantic. The staff’s female writers, though, thought the action was way too much, too soon. “We were like, ‘It is?’” Hader later recalled. “They said, ‘You sleep with a guy once and he buys you a laptop? Head for the hills.’ And we were like, ‘That’s interesting, OK.’” (In the final scene, Sally does perceive Barry’s laptop purchase as more creepy than sweet.)

As Wong’s singlehood continued, she engaged in multiple courtships, including one with a “big, fancy movie director” who goes unnamed in the special. “I think for the longest time I was so focused on getting dicked down,” she explains, “because the task of finding a boyfriend, someone who I consider talented, someone who makes me laugh, someone who I have a real connection with, someone who I look up to as an artist, someone that I would feel proud to introduce to my kids, my peers and my friends and my mentors, I mean, that seemed impossible, you know?”

Wong eventually expresses her preference for “a divorced dad,” explaining, “one woman’s trash is another woman’s trained trash.” (Hader was linked to both Anna Kendrick and Rachel Bilson following his March 2018 divorce from Maggie Carey, with whom he shares three daughters.)

“Divorce gets a really bad reputation and it can sound really scary and full of acrimony,” she explains, “but then just look at me as an alternate example of how it can be: I’m best friends with my ex-husband.” In March 2023, Wong said that she and Hakuta “still to this day has ultimate veto power” over jokes about him and their family in her standup. “I need him desperately, and I need to respect him,” she said. During her Golden Globes acceptance speech for best actress in a limited series, Wong told Hakuta, “It’s because of you that I’m able to be a working mother.”

At the end of her special, Wong acknowledges her “new boyfriend,” telling the audience at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, “I did fall in love again. Some of you might know who the guy is. And, it just so happens to be the man who sent me all of those flowers in Europe.”

During the special, which was filmed during Wong’s sold-out 12-day Netflix Is a Joke Fest residency back in May, she never outright utters Hader’s name. But as previously reported by Rolling Stone, while performing her closing night set, Wong asked the crowd if they wanted to meet her boyfriend. “That was a very informative evening,” Hader quipped after joining Wong onstage.

Earlier in the hour, Wong says that her adventurous eating habits don’t align with some of the white men she had dated, including one Midwesterner whom she referred to as Blake. “These white dudes from the Midwest, they get diarrhea every time they eat a dish that’s not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she jokes. Wong then says that while she and Blake met her college friend at an authentic Chinese restaurant, he mistakenly poured their tea in rice bowls.

“You guys want a secret?” Hader, who is from Oklahoma, asked the audience at Wong’s Los Angeles show. “I’m the guy who poured the tea in the rice bowl. And when I did that, the look on Ali’s face was a mixture of embarrassment and she was so stoked. She had this look on her face like, ‘You’re in the act, motherfucker.’”

Before exiting the stage together, Hader reportedly told the crowd, “All I have to say is, Ali Wong is off the market.”