Bill Hader had a brief, shining moment of hope. The gray kitten named LaCroix appeared to be approaching him, curious and deliberate, closing the distance across the cushion. Then she planted both paws on his knee, launched off his chest, and vanished across the room. ‘I had a little moment of like, oh, you’re coming to me,’ he said afterward, with the quiet resignation of a man who understood exactly what had happened. ‘Oh, no. You’re using me to escape.’ That is the essential dynamic of a kitten date, and it turns out not even two Emmy-winning performers can reliably charm their way past it.
The Dodo brought Bill Hader and Quinta Brunson together at Wallis Annenberg PetSpace, where LaCroix and Perrier, a pair of gray kittens available for adoption, had been in residence for about a week. The setup was simple: a game of questions, some treats, a chew root, and an honest test of whether two people who make their living reading a room could win over animals with no professional obligations whatsoever.
When a sorority rented the theater and paid for it later
The questions moved fast and the kittens moved faster. Hader confirmed the legend: working at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, a sorority had rented the whole room to watch Titanic before its wide release. They were making fun of him while he tore their tickets. ‘As I tore the tickets, I go, enjoy the movie. The boat sinks. Leo dies at the end.’ He was fired. He does not regret it.
Brunson, for her part, shared that she made comedy videos quickly, put them online quickly, and that the central challenge of moving from short-form sketches to a full television series was simply the volume of notes, ‘from people who are genuinely trying to make the thing better.’ She also half-surprised herself by remembering she had created a comedy series called Up for Adoption, built around rescue animals at a pet store. Real animals were placed with real families through the production.
Thirty seconds, two performers, an indifferent gray kitten
The voice challenge put 30 seconds on the clock. Hader opened with a Southern preacher. Brunson followed. Mickey Mouse made an appearance. Perrier, the other kitten, watched from a moderate distance and offered no score. When asked which of his characters would be best equipped to manage two high-energy kittens, Hader nominated Dr. Fuzzy Bottom, a therapist he voiced in Zootopia, on the grounds that she specialized in bringing animals down from an elevated state.
Brunson won LaCroix over eventually. The instrument was a chew root. ‘She just needed some of this,’ Brunson said, holding the root with the quiet triumph of someone who had been patient and strategic and was now being rewarded.
Before the session ended, the two of them had run out to buy supplies and built small gift baskets for the kittens to take into their next chapter. Hader mentioned, without drama, that his house was lost in the Palisades fire, which means his Emmys are likely in a storage unit somewhere. The ones Brunson keeps at home are in the house. The rest are at her studio office.
A chew root on the cushion
At the end of the afternoon, the chew root sat on the cushion between two empty baskets, slightly gnawed, holding its shape.
LaCroix and Perrier were available for adoption through Wallis Annenberg PetSpace. Brunson had earned at least one of their endorsements. Hader had served as a ramp, which, by cat standards, is also a form of trust.
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