Jeff Hiller stopped by The Daily Show to discuss his new memoir, Actress of a Certain Age.
The book by Hiller, the actor known for his roles in the series Nightcap and Somebody Somewhere, was published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster. A critic for Kirkus called it “a chatty, hilarious, effervescently entertaining autobiography anchored by self-deprecating humility and humanity.”
Hiller told Daily Show correspondent Desi Lydic, “It’s all about my humiliating experiences in my career. And I thought, I’ve made it; things are all better now, and then when I open the book, there’s a typo on the cover of my book.”
He then showed the audience the spine of the book, which reads Actress of a Cetain Age. They erupted in laughter. “Not today, Cetain! Not today!” he said.
Lydic noted that each chapter of Hiller’s book is named after an actor’s memoir.
“When I got this opportunity to write a celebrity memoir—with a really loose definition of the word celebrity—I wanted to rely on the fact that I have read all of these memoirs, and I also wanted to write it for other people who maybe committed the cardinal sin of aging past 40 without realizing all the dreams they wanted in their life, and have a little bit of hope in it,” he said. “I talk about how ‘compare invites despair.’ And I did come up with that on my own. I didn’t. It’s a pretty hack cliché, actually.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
