The one actor who will always regret hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’: “I only have bad memories”
For many actors, hosting Saturday Night Live is a bucket-list item and something they’ve dreamed about for their entire careers, if not their whole lives. However, there’s a reason why being careful what you wish for has become such a cliché.
The weekly staple has endured its fair share of dismal hosts over the years, which is part and parcel of bringing in a different face every seven days. It’s a sink-or-swim environment, and there are no guarantees until it reaches the air on whether or not someone will be a delight or a disaster.
There are a number of factors that can conspire to turn a great idea on paper into a nightmare when the cameras are rolling, which history has shown covers everything from a host being completely unprepared, painfully unfunny, thoroughly disinterested, or generally being a dickhead that nobody likes working with.
None of the above applied to Jesse Eisenberg, though, who realised a decades-long ambition when he was enlisted to front the January 29th, 2011 episode. He was riding high on the success of his Academy Award-nominated turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, and since his background was largely in comedy, he didn’t come across as someone who’d drop the ball.
Despite being a lifelong fan, the star admitted that he made a grievous error in the run-up to his SNL bow. “I only have bad memories because I did such a dumb thing,” he explained to Today. “My dream when I was 17 was to write for SNL.”
There’s nothing wrong with that, but when he was asked to host, Eisenberg “assumed I could write all the sketches.” Obviously, that isn’t the case, and never has been. “I didn’t realise, I’m an idiot, and I was also just wanting to write. I’ve wanted to write my whole life. So I spent the week slipping scripts to different actors. I didn’t realise that was not the way you do that.”
It’s easy to see how that could have been perceived as arrogant and egotistical, with an actor strolling into SNL in rehearsal week and handing pre-written skits to a roster of writers and performers who make their living on the show. Unsurprisingly, none of Eisenberg’s material made it to air.
He didn’t mind, since he acknowledged that it was “so unbelievably inappropriate and offensive of me” to do it in the first place, and he also revealed that he’d been set up. He didn’t know that guest hosts don’t write their own material, and they sure as shit don’t give it to the writers, but somebody told him otherwise.
“It turns out I was sabotaged,” Eisenberg added. “I was assured, ‘Yes, of course. That sounds great’, they said.” The two-time Oscar nominee made a cameo appearance on the following week’s episode, and that remains the last time he ever appeared on SNL.
