Let us be grateful that Bill Hader chose not to kill NoHo Hank in Barry’s first episode

[Warning: Spoilers for Barry’s first season below.]

HBO’s assassin-turned-actor comedy Barry was one of last year’s best TV shows, having demonstrated a careful, deeply impressive navigation of broad comedy and gutting tragedy. Anchoring the former half of that equation was Anthony Carrigan’s NoHo Hank, the fast-talking Chechen mobster who, we are aghast to discover, was originally written to die in the pilot episode.

Co-creator and star Bill Hader revealed as much in a new interview with Uproxx, saying that Carrigan was good enough to “play his way” into more screen time. “Yeah, when I shoot up the car, he was dead,” Hader said of the show’s first episode. “And then Alec and I said, ‘We’d be insane to kill that guy. He’s so funny.’ That’s why in episode two, his arm’s in a sling, and everything.”

As the season’s trailers have indicated, Hank reportedly plays a much larger role in the show’s second outing. Hader also teases the potential return of another character, one that pretty much anybody who watched the first season figured for dead. The first season ended with Barry appearing to kill Paula Newsome’s Moss, but when Hader was asked if there was ever any thought about “keeping” her around, Hader replied with a laugh. “Who said she’s not coming back?”

“[W]e don’t know if he killed Moss,” Hader elaborated. “It’s pretty inferred what happened, but we don’t know what happened. And so, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the season, she’s missing, and no one knows where she is.”

That’s a bold tease, and it’s got us even more stoked for Sunday night’s season two premiere.