Jeff Hiller in Conversation with Poulomi Saha
Emmy-winning actor discusses his memoir on two decades of character work before overnight recognition, in conversation with a UC Berkeley professor.
Why we picked this
Hiller's memoir is about twenty years of doing the work without the recognition — a more honest account of an acting career than most celebrity books attempt.
Jeff Hiller won the 2025 Primetime Emmy Award for his performance in Somebody Somewhere, but that recognition came after two decades of steady, largely unheralded work in theater and television. His memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success, is an account of that stretch — the auditions, the bit parts, the character roles that paid the rent and developed the craft — and what it actually takes to build a career in performance when fame is slow to arrive, or doesn’t arrive at all.
The conversation is moderated by Poulomi Saha, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of Critical Theory, bringing a serious intellectual framework to questions about labor, identity, and representation in American entertainment.
City Arts & Lectures consistently pairs writers and performers with interlocutors who push past the promotional surface. That this one matches an actor who took the long road with a scholar who thinks carefully about cultural production suggests the conversation will earn its runtime.