Billy Eichner came very close to quitting show business after ten years of trying to make it big in Hollywood, but was talked out of it by Joan Rivers.
“The closest I came [to quitting] was in 2009,” the comedian, 47, told Page Six in a recent exclusive interview while promoting his newly released audiobook, “Billy on Billy.”
Four years before that, there had been enormous buzz about Eichner with a flattering article in the New York Times, and “everyone just basically insinuated that my life was going to change,” he explained, adding that agents “were telling me I was going to be on TV with my own show in six months.”
“And honestly, I guess they weren’t entirely wrong. It’s just that it took six years and not six months.”
The “Billy on the Street” alum admitted that he began to get scared, worrying “about money and just living and paying my bills.”
“You can romanticize being a struggling artist in your 20s,” Eichner shared, “but I was 30 [then] and so that wasn’t as cute to me. I had a harder time rationalizing [it], at that point.”
So, he reached out to Joan Rivers, whom he had known for several years and worked with on a failed pilot.
“She invited me to come to dinner and drinks,” Eichner recalled, “and it’s at that dinner where she encouraged me to hold on a little bit longer.” She also told him that he had a “unique energy.”
“I think she really saw something in me and she thought I could make it,” he theorized. “And it truly is the reason I decided to give it another couple of years. And sure enough, that was 2009. In 2010, my first video went viral, and in 2011, ‘Billy on the Street’ became a rising TV show.”
The “AHS” alum isn’t sure what Rivers saw in him.
“Maybe she saw our backgrounds were similar,” he shared. “We were unconventional, we were outrageous. We were from New York City. She obviously loved gay men, and she responded to that part of me. You know, we were Jewish, we love the theater, even though we were trying to carve out our careers.”
Amazingly, Rivers was the first standup comedian Eichner ever saw when his dad snuck him into her performance at the Shore Haven Beach Club when he was eight, “and 20, 25 years later, she became my real champion.”
The “Bros” star said he was happy to include his memories of Rivers, who died in 2014 at age 81, and to honor her.
The surprisingly touching book also honors Eichner’s parents, Debbie and Jay Eichner, who both died before their son’s success and were incredibly supportive of all his endeavors.
Eichner said he’s been moved by people’s reactions to his parents.
“It’s been kind of surreal, in a great way, to watch all of these people who didn’t know my parents, now feeling like they did,” he noted. “And there are so many comments saying, ‘If only every kid were as loved as you were by Jay and Debbie Eichner, the world would be a different place.”