The actor who wishes they’d never hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’: “I would give that zero stars”
Hosting Saturday Night Live for the first time can be a daunting prospect, even for the most experienced and talented performers. Unfortunately, one actor made their debut at the worst possible moment, and with the benefit of hindsight, they didn’t exactly rate their performance very highly.
Some people enjoy being their own toughest critic, but in this case, there was only one reason and one reason only why the star in question regretted their decision. It was arguably the toughest gig in SNL history, and being thrown in at the deepest possible deep end was the show’s ultimate sink or swim situation.
By the early 2000s, Reese Witherspoon was already one of her generation’s fastest-rising young actors. Pleasantville, Cruel Intentions, and Election had marked her out as a star on the rise, with the latter earning her a Golden Globe nomination in the ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’ category, before Legally Blonde sent her career soaring to new heights.
Robert Luketic’s comedy edged her closer to the A-list after releasing in July 2001, so it was inevitable that SNL would be making overtures in her direction. As expected, she was offered the hosting gig, but the difficult part was that it was the September 29th, 2001 episode, the 27th season’s premiere, and the first time the series had been on the airwaves since 9/11.
“I would give that zero stars,” the Academy Award winner admitted on the Armchair Expert podcast. “Do not recommend.” It would have been a hard thing to deal with had the host been a second, third, fourth, fifth, or even tenth-time compere, but Witherspoon acknowledged that it was too much to bear.
“It was just too much responsibility for a 24-year-old girl,” she said. Witherspoon had initially planned to drop out of hosting, but Lorne Michaels persuaded her otherwise, telling her that “I really need you to show up, I really, really need this,” and that he needed her “to come out and do something a little light and tell America, you can’t feel, we gotta laugh again.”
Seasoned veterans would have struggled with the spotlight of hosting SNL‘s first post-9/11 episode and trying to bring a smile to viewers’ faces less than three weeks later, but for a 24-year-old doing it for the first time, Witherspoon was well within her rights to be trepidatious about shouldering that particular burden.
There was even some minor behind-the-scenes controversy to go along with her hosting debut, with several staffers voicing their concerns that 9/11 wasn’t mentioned during SNL‘s signature opening monologue, which some thought was a mistake, given that the episode was only a couple of weeks removed and the show itself was a New York institution.
“I completely left my body,” Witherspoon added of the experience. “And did not go again for 15 years.” It wouldn’t be until May 2015 that she hosted for a second time, and the good news was that the pressure was nowhere near as crushing as it was before.
