The four actors Lorne Michaels will always regret not casting on ‘Saturday Night Live’: “No one gets it all right”
Based on his track record of unearthing rough diamonds over the last 50 years, nobody can doubt Lorne Michaels’ credentials for knowing a star when he sees one. However, even the Saturday Night Live head honcho has his regrets.
The weekend staple has been one of the industry’s most fertile production lines and favoured proving grounds since its inception, when John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase were among the original ensemble. Since then, a ludicrous number of names to have passed through SNL‘s doors have gone on to bigger and better things.
Dick Ebersol, who was instrumental in getting the show on the air in the first place, thinks Eddie Murphy is the single most important performer in Saturday Night Live‘s history. Whether anyone agrees or disagrees, he’s just the tip of an iceberg that broke off Bill Murray, Robert Downey Jr, Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, and more to send them floating off to Hollywood.
Plenty of recognisable faces have tried and failed to land a spot on the roster, too, with John Goodman going on to host SNL 13 times after his audition became the worst moment of his professional life. Jennifer Aniston, Aubrey Plaza, Donald Glover, and Geena Davis are also among them, but four particular talents stick in Michaels’ mind as the ones who got away.
“Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell auditioned,” he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “There were lots of people who you’d see how brilliant they were, but you knew on some level that it wasn’t going to work. Lisa Kudrow gave a brilliant audition, but it was at the time when it was Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn.”
Those three all did very well for themselves despite missing out on SNL, but Michaels made special mention of a certain rubber-faced comic who auditioned multiple times and didn’t get hired, before going on to become the highest-paid actor on the planet, a certified A-lister, and a box office phenomenon.
“I wasn’t at the Jim Carrey audition,” he clarified. “But somebody who was there said, ‘I don’t think Lorne would like it’, and they were probably wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Or maybe they were right, who knows? No one gets it all right.” If anything, Carrey was better off without SNL, with In Living Color giving him the platform that led to his life-changing 1994, he has no reason to regret not making the cut.
Kudrow, Colbert, and Carell auditioned in 1990, 1992, and 1995, respectively, with the latter suffering more than the rest because his wife, Nancy, got hired and he didn’t. Some of them had to wait longer than others for their breakthrough, with Friends premiering four years after Kudrow’s unsuccessful test, while Colbert and Carell had to wait until the early 2000s before The Daily Show and Bruce Almighty strapped a rocket to their backs.
Still, if that quartet are the only four that Michaels felt compelled to mention by name when asked about his biggest SNL regret, he evidently rued the day he let them slip through his fingers.
