Sure, Conan O’Brien’s ass got kicked in by #TeamLannister while playing Overwatch on Monday, but that was just in the game. Had he played it (or any other video game, for that matter) against Angry Birds star Bill Hader, however, there probably would’ve been a beatdown in real life. Especially if the game in question was GoldenEye 007, the classic Nintendo 64 first-person shooter that expertly turned multiplayer gaming parties into violent, spit-flying scream-fests. Seriously, there’s a good chance the man we all know and love as SNL‘s Stefon might have inflicted some serious physical damage on some poor bastard named Steve.
O’Brien asked Hader whether or not he’d played the original Angry Birds game, a question that immediately dovetailed into both men’s reasons for almost never playing video games. The talk show host chalks it up to “not [being] very good at them” and “[getting] confused.” As for Hader, it has less to do with his abilities (or lack thereof) and more to do with his easily enraged and super-competitive alter ego.
“I was obsessed… You guys remember GoldenEye [007]? It was on the Nintendo. So I would play GoldenEye and this kid named Steve knew the game really well. If you were shooting… He knew the game so well, he knew where you would appear. So you would appear and he would just be there and he would shoot you. And he would always go, ‘Head shot!'”
Sounds pretty annoying, right? For a young Hader, it was. So much so that he couldn’t resist physical, real-world retaliation:
“I got mad at him and I threw the controller at him. And I called him a sloppy b*tch. Which I’ve never called anybody before in my life.”
So yeah, that’s why Hader doesn’t really do video games, and why he never really played Angry Birds (despite its being a single-player mobile app) before starring in this past weekend’s box office hit. Cue Stefon’s guaranteed character break in 3, 2…