David Spade Reveals He Turned Down the ‘Late Night’ Job that Went to Conan O’Brien

Norman Weiss November 12, 2015, 9:17 pm

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David Spade reveals he turned down the Late Night job that went to Conan O’Brien

Spade left that revelation out of his new memoir, but he says NBC and Lorne Michaels approached him about taking over for David Letterman while he was still on SNL in the early ’90s. Spade, though, felt he was too inexperienced to host a late-night show — which made it even more shocking for him when somebody with even less experience got the job. “I said, ‘Why me?’ And they said, ‘Well, you sort of brought a new attitude to Saturday Night Live and a little edge, and you’re not like People magazine. You’re going after people, and we like that.’ And I was young and new. And I said, ‘Aw, I don’t think I’d really want to do a talk show.’”

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