![]() One thing about being Murray is that I’ve only had the opportunity to be a show person. But it’s still kind of there, as you can see. It’s like you, but tone it down like ten notches.” It’s supposed to be me, but a “normal” person without the vaudeville shtick. They told me, “Murray, it’s you, but no showbiz. ![]() What is it like to play a character that is somebody else’s idea of who you are, or maybe used to be? I make this joke: “Thank God, because I wouldn’t have gotten the part.” So the Fred Rococo character is loosely based on how she saw me when she first moved to New York all those years ago. I’m the only one that didn’t have to audition. She told me they were interviewing writers, and they pitched me to be in the show. We gotta hang in there, we gotta keep going.” Two years later, she got an HBO deal. I’m her best hype man, so I was saying, “Something better’s gonna happen. She was very emotional, and we were very bummed out. I remember we were doing my Christmas show, and we were in the basement of Joe’s Pub, and she was told that the pilot didn’t get picked up. She did a pilot for Amazon - I don’t know if you remember that, but it was like a voting thing. She started going on Amy Schumer’s show, and the audiences were going nuts for her. Eventually we moved to Joe’s Pub and worked there. We became quick friends and we’d be in each other’s shows. She used to wear, back in the old days, just a corset top and underwear. ![]() She used to do my show every week, and she’d kill it. She just moved here.” And I said “You sing?! Hey, wanna do my show Saturday night?” And she did. My friend was like, “This is Bridget Everett. When she first moved to New York, I was doing a weekly show at Mo Pitkin’s, and the second I met her … I’ll never forget, it was on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. How did you find out about Somebody Somewhere?īridget and I are friends. Hill opened up about performing 24/7, Liza Minnelli, and, of course, showbiz. Hill plays Fred Rococo, the emcee of Choir Practice, the weekly good-vibe hangout hiding in a dead mall. The show stars Everett as Sam, a woman wading through the loss of her sister and finding community in an LGBTQ-friendly performing space in Manhattan, Kansas. Partnering with longtime pal Bridget Everett, Hill is part of the ensemble of HBO’s Somebody Somewhere. Old-school jokes and interjections of “Showbiz!” roll over audiences in a classic Borscht Belt style. But Hill has always been more of an in-person event. Like fellow downtown legend Mx Justin Vivian Bond, Hill made his way into John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus. Hill took his Vegas-inflected act to the burlesque scene and beyond, working with Dirty Martini and emceeing the Miss Lez pageant for much of the late aughts and early 2010s. But even after the campaign, the party would not die. The Murray Hill persona began as a performance-art piece in 1996 with Hill running for mayor. His old-school comic persona, natty-tie collection, and slicked-back hair are the stuff of legend. Murray Hill has been an institution of the New York City art scene for decades.
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