The history-making ‘Saturday Night Live’ flop who blamed the writers for their failure: “They were fucking idiots”
No one likes a sore loser, but Anthony Michael Hall went beyond sore when it came to Saturday Night Live. His jealousy and bitterness was agonising.
You might see that as an ugly and uncouth characteristic, but it was worth remembering that Hall was still only a child when he started treading the boards of the acting industry. It’s an unforgiving business at the best of times, and hardly famed for its nurturing treatment of kids, so it was all too easy for him to fall into a trap of ego and jadedness.
To be fair, those pitfalls were effectively set up for the actor to walk right into, after he was spotted by John Hughes at just 13 years old and taken under the director’s wing, whether he liked it or not, to star in a three-feature streak of some of his most acclaimed 1980s films: Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, and The Breakfast Club.
But after a while, that archetype of teen movies and geeky characters understandably wore a little thin for Hall, and so he branched out. By branching out, he meant the big time. The bright lights and city glamour of being “Live from New York”. He meant Saturday Night Live. Yet despite making history as the youngest-ever cast member, at just 17 years old, sadly, the stars weren’t about to align.
To all intents and purposes, Hall thought he had cracked the code of being a bona fide comedy actor out of the shackles of teen naivety, only for it all to come crashing down in the space of a season. He was fired after only a year on the show, though admittedly found himself in good company, as his fellow dismissed rejects included Robert Downey Jr and Joan Cusack.
Even still, it was no consolation for the young star, who, for all his tender years, felt he had been robbed and saw no way forward out of this rut – so he lashed out. “They were fucking idiots,” Hall said in the aftermath.
“They had no fucking idea how to write for me. They had no affection for my abilities. They didn’t know how to write for me. I feel like I’m a talented kid and if people recognise it, that’s great.”
While his words were cringe-inducingly precocious, he was barely 18 years old at the time he was let go from SNL in 1986. There probably isn’t a kid in the world who, if landed in that same situation, wouldn’t try to blame everybody else but themselves. Hall was clearly bruised and reeling from the snub, seeing his chance at the big leagues snatched away.
Of course, this is not to say that his firing from Saturday Night Live wasn’t at least in some way warranted. You could argue that he was just too young to take on the job of a lifetime, and any writer would have struggled to help him carve his place alongside a line of seasoned comedy professionals. It was history-making, but also a legendary mistake.
With the benefit of hindsight, Hall was able to dust himself off from the setback and move forwards as an actor, eventually getting his heart’s desire of ridding the geek glasses and stepping into more serious roles. He may look back on his SNL year with a shudder, but at the end of the day, the acting world is not a piece of child’s play.
