Bill Hader Had Very Blunt Way of Asking Out Ali Wong After Her Divorce

Bill Hader and comedian Ali Wong have been in a relationship since April 2023, after briefly dating in late 2022 and then eventually reconciling. The pair got together not long after Wong separated from her husband of eight years, entrepreneur Justin Hakuta, with whom she shares two daughters. And from the way the 42-year-old tells it, Hader was certainly not shy about asking her out.

Wong opened up about her dating adventures as a divorced single mother during a sold-out show at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles during the Netflix Is a Joke Fest on Sunday night, capping off a 12-night residency.

"I didn’t expect the news of my divorce to be so widespread and public," Wong recalled, via Rolling Stone, when she announced the news that she and Hakuta were divorcing. "I felt really embarrassed and ashamed, but I didn’t realize that all of these media outlets were acting like a bat signal letting all potentially interested men know. I’ve never been pursued this much in my life."

Wong joked that when she was newly single, she wasn't looking for anything serious and just wanted to "get dicked down," equating her mindset at the time to "just got out of prison energy." However, just one day after joining a dating app, she recalled a male acquaintance reaching out to her.

"I get a phone call from this guy who I met at a dinner party in the past, and he got my number from a mutual friend," she continued. "He was like, 'Hey, I just happened to hear the news about your divorce, and I’ve had a crush on you forever. I actually told my best friend years ago that you were my dream girl, and I know it sounds crazy, but I want you to be my girlfriend.'"

However, Wong was initially uninterested. "I was like, 'I just paid $25,'" she said, referring to the dating app. "You seem really nice, but I gotta get my money’s worth."

Not long after that phone conversation, Wong said that she had left for a trip to Europe and that her suitor proceeded to send flowers to every hotel she stayed at throughout her trip. But while her girlfriends thought the gesture was sweet, her male friends said he "sounded like a psychopath."

"That’s how cheap and lazy men have become," she continued. "When a fellow man commits any act of kindness, any romantic gesture, it must be a symptom of an undiagnosed mental illness."

Later in her set, Wong told the audience that she had a new boyfriend who some people may or may not be familiar with—admitting that he was also the man from the story—and asked if they wanted to meet him. And sure enough, Hader walked out onstage and handed her a single rose.

"That was a very informative evening," the Barry star told the crowd, before gushing about his girlfriend of over one year.

"I got to go on the road [with her] and I watched her work as she goes up, she tries these things," Hader continued. "She’s taking tons of notes. The amount of work that goes into making this look so effortless, and she just sold out 12 nights at the Wiltern." And if it weren't already abundantly clear, before leaving the stage he said into the microphone: "All I have to say is, Ali Wong is off the market."

In others words, the moral of the story here is that it never hurts to shoot your shot, even when you're a widely beloved actor and comedian.