How Seth MacFarlane narrowly escaped tragedy on 9/11 flight
Love him or loathe him, Seth MacFarlane has become one of the biggest players in 21st century animation, something that never would have happened were it not for a late night and a twist of fate.
After working on the writing staff of several children’s cartoons, MacFarlane caught his big break when his first self-developed creation was given the green light. It may have been two-dimensional, but Family Guy was a long way away from his early years spent toiling in a Cartoon Network writers’ room.
The first episode aired in January 1999, and even though it ended up being cancelled twice, the series is still going strong today. It’s up there with The Simpsons and South Park as the ‘big three’ of modern animated comedy that’s been on the airwaves for an inordinate amount of time, but MacFarlane was nowhere near done building his empire. In fact, he hadn’t even started.
However, if it weren’t for a hangover, he’d have never gotten that chance. The filmmaker had stayed up a little too late and had a few too many on September 10th, 2001, which saw him running so late to the airport that he missed his flight entirely. He was supposed to be a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre after being hijacked by terrorists.
“I was booked on that flight, and I was drinking the night before, and I was hungover,” MacFarlane recalled years later. “And I missed the plane by about ten minutes. It was a very close call for me.” He booked the next flight out of town, but after waking up from what he believed was a well-earned rest, he discovered that tragedy had struck the United States.
Calls don’t come much closer than that, with MacFarlane not even the only Hollywood figure who was supposed to be on Flight 11. Mark Wahlberg shared that he was also due to be on board, but at the last minute he and his friends opted to instead charter a private plane to a film festival in Toronto. He adopted a different approach over the near miss, though, one that earned him plenty of backlash.
Wahlberg suggested that if he’d been on Flight 11, “It wouldn’t have went down like it did.”
Needless to say, an actor intimating that they could have potentially – and single-handedly – prevented a national tragedy were it not for a spur-of-the-moment decision did not go down well, with the star issuing an apology for making a speculative statement that was “ridiculous to begin with”.
MacFarlane would never be so bold, leaving him grateful that he suffered from what was comfortably the luckiest hangover of his life.
