Jeff Hiller: Chicken Fried Steak
Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle
Rachel Belle
4.4 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you fell in love with Jeff Hiller’s character Joel on Somebody, Somewhere (he was just nominated for his first Emmy for his performance!), you’ll want to pick up his new memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success.
Jeff tells host Rachel Belle how he got his big break, his first role on a TV show at age 45 after 20 years of auditions, and why his childhood ambitions of becoming a pastor were dashed.
Jeff loves eating in restaurants; he’d eat out every night if his husband would let him. So Tan Vinh, one of The Seattle Times’ food writers and critics, joins the show to talk about what it’s really like to eat at restaurants for a living. What does three dinners a night do to the body? What does Tan eat and drink on his days off? What does he do with the endless leftovers? Listen in to find out!
Then Jeff Hiller shares two options for his last meal: one for the little angel perched on his shoulder and one for the little devil squatting on the other.
- Watch Rachel’s Cascade PBS TV show The Nosh with Rachel Belle -- Season 2 is out now!
- Sign up for Rachel’s (free!) bi-weekly Cascade PBS newsletter for more food musings!
- Follow along on Instagram!
- Order Rachel’s cookbook Open Sesame.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights. |
| 0:05.6 | Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show. |
| 0:19.7 | I'm Rachel Bell and this is your last meal. |
| 0:22.9 | The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most, and we dig into |
| 0:27.0 | the history, culture, or science of those meals with experts from around the world. |
| 0:31.9 | Today on the program, actor Jeff Hiller, best known for starring in one of my favorite shows of all time, |
| 0:39.6 | Somebody Somewhere on HBO. |
| 0:41.8 | If you've seen the show, he plays Joel. |
| 0:44.0 | Jeff just wrote his first book, a memoir called Actress of a Certain Age, |
| 0:48.6 | My 20-year Trail to Overnight Success. |
| 0:51.6 | And Jeff really likes eating in restaurants. |
| 0:53.8 | He would probably eat in a restaurant every single night if his husband let him. to overnight success. And Jeff really likes eating in restaurants. |
| 0:54.3 | He would probably eat in a restaurant |
| 0:56.0 | every single night if his husband let him. |
| 0:58.3 | So I invited Seattle Times food writer |
| 1:00.4 | and restaurant critic Tonvin to my house |
| 1:03.4 | to talk about what it's really like to eat out for a living. |
| 1:07.1 | It's a lot of salt, it's a lot of butter. |
| 1:09.8 | It gets queasy. |
| 1:12.4 | I just feel, ugh. |
| 1:14.7 | I realize that everyone wants to be a critic. |
| 1:16.6 | We eat for free and have an expense account. |
... |
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