9 Stars Who Said No to ‘Saturday Night Live’
For many comedians, a spot on Saturday Night Live — on the Studio 8H stage or even in the writers room — is the dream. But it isn’t the dream for everyone. More than a few big-names celebrities actually turned down steady employment on the NBC sketch-comedy show, including a young Jennifer Aniston.
And in a new interview, decades later, Aniston recalled the “self-righteous” attitude with which she turned down an offer from Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels. Read anecdotes from her and other SNL woulda-coulda-shouldas below.
Catherine O'Hara
This Schitt’s Creek star explained to the Toronto Star in 2007 that she was an SNL cast member for “maybe two weeks” in 1981, after her Canadian sketch-comedy show SCTV ended its Canadian run and before it started its American run. “They were just getting rolling [on the new season],” she said. “I hung out with some nice people, tried to come up with some ideas … but I never really felt involved.”
But O’Hara realized she “had to leave” SNL once SCTV made its comeback. “I said I’d made a huge mistake,” she said. “I’m not proud of that. I felt stupid doing it. But I had to come home. I couldn’t not be with them.”
John Candy
This Planes, Trains & Automobiles star — and scene partner of O’Hara’s in Home Alone — was one of the SCTV stars whom onetime SNL producer Dick Ebersol wanted to poach, per Vulture.
Ebersol reached out to Candy to enlist him in 1981, but in the book Saturday Night, SNL historians Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad say the actor “was mortified at being caught in the middle of the tug of war between Saturday Night and SCTV” and “retreated to his farm, refusing to answer his phone,” as Vulture reported.
Bonnie Hunt
The star of Life With Bonnie and other sitcoms revealed to the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that Michaels offered her an SNL spot after she made a name for herself in Chicago’s Second City troupe. “I asked, ‘If there’s an end of a scene that doesn’t feel like it’s working, can you improvise?’” she remembered. “And he said, ‘Absolutely not.’”
Hunt also noticed that SNL was a boy’s club at the time. “It didn’t seem like women’s careers were really launched on that show,” she remarked to the Times.
Andy Dick
The controversial comic told Laughspin in 2011 he was asked to join the SNL cast early in his career. “Literally, they were just offering it to me. I said no because I had just come off The Ben Stiller Show, but the truth of the matter is I was afraid I would not be able to do a few characters every week. I didn’t have the confidence that I do now,” he said.
Dick added, “I felt like I was depleted of characters and I couldn’t create any more. There was just no way — especially in a live setting. I was petrified. For The Ben Stiller Show, we shot every single scene like a short film. So if I felt we needed to, we can just start again. You can’t do that on Saturday Night Live.”
Amy Sedaris
“When Janeane Garofalo was leaving the show [in 1995] I met with Lorne Michaels, but at that time we were doing [the Off-Off-Broadway play] One Woman Shoe, and it was everything I wanted,” Sedaris said in a 2003 interview with writer David Rakoff. “Maybe even three years earlier, it would have been great, but at that point, it was like, Oh, it’s too late. A few years later, Strangers with Candy fell into my lap. But television’s not something that I ever thought about or planned.”
Danny McBride
Even though this star of The Righteous Gemstones had been a lifelong SNL fan, he was already booked by the time the show came knocking. “Lorne had actually prodded me to see if I was interested in joining the cast,” McBride said on the podcast This Past Weekend earlier this year. “But it was really the same exact week that we sold Eastbound and Down. And so I was like, ‘As much as I’m flattered, this is what I’m gonna go off and do.’”
Johnny Knoxville
Before Jackass hit MTV, SNL producers saw footage of Knoxville’s ridiculous stunts and made an offer to the daredevil comedian, as Jackass co-creator Jeff Tremaine told The A.V. Club in 2006.
“It was at the point where I either say yes to my friends, where we had all the control, or yes to Saturday Night Live, where none of my friends were really going to be there and I had no control,” Knoxville explained to The Washington Times in 2005. “I just thought I made the right decision.”
Mindy Kaling
In a 2019 chat on the Daily Beast podcast The Last Laugh, Kaling said she was invited to audition for the cast of SNL during Season 2 of The Office. And Office executive producer Greg Daniels said that if she was selected, he’d let her out of her contract.
“[After the SNL audition] I had heard that Lorne wanted to offer me a job as a writer there, but not as a performer. But there was some hint at that point that if I stayed on long enough, like Jason Sudeikis, that I could maybe graduate to be a performer. That was dangled to me, so I thought, ‘Well, that’s pretty exciting.’ So I went back and talked to Greg about it and he said to me, ‘No, that’s not the deal we made. The deal we made is that if you get cast as a cast member, you can go.’ And it was really a life-changing thing. I think the course of my career would have gone really differently had I left The Office and done that instead.”
Jennifer Aniston
Aniston told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 she met with Michaels about an SNL role before Friends came her way. “I was so young and dumb and I went into Lorne’s office and I was like, ‘I hear women are not respected on this show.’ I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but it was something like, ‘I would prefer if it were like the days of Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin.’ I mean, it was such a boys’ club back then, but who the f*** was I to be saying this to Lorne Michaels?!”
More recently, Aniston said on the Armchair Expert (per Entertainment Weekly) she thought her attitude about SNL at the time was self-righteous. “I always thought I was such hot s***,” she said. “The story of that is all very confusing.”
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R
SNL is an america-centric show that fails entirely in the rest of the world. And its not the drawcard that actors, marketers and producers appear to think it is. There's a lot of ads of the "Person from SNL!!!" variety..no-one outside the US has ever heard of them.
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V
My first cousin has been working behind the scenes with Lorne Michaels of SNL for many years now. I still haven’t watched more than 10 minutes of maybe 3 of their shows. Even in the early days. Nothing against my cousin, I ‘ll always love her. SNL type of comedy doesn’t do it for me. I find it kinda silly and jerky. To each his own. Love you cousin JD. Hugs n kisses to you and Christine. Vincent F.
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