Jack Black’s abandoned ‘Saturday Night Live’ audition: “I was not gonna get in”
If you’re unfamiliar with the history of Saturday Night Live, it might seem like just another sketch show, an hour of jokes and celebrity cameos to fill a late-night slot. In reality, though, few platforms in entertainment have launched more careers or shaped more stars than that one.
In reality, SNL is something of a miracle. In the mid-1970s, NBC approached creator Lorne Michaels to develop a Saturday night programme to fill the slot previously occupied by The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The catch was that the network was not especially invested in its success. Executives would have preferred to continue airing Carson reruns rather than risk putting new and untested talent on air.
On top of that, Michaels doubled down on the risk by betting entirely on new talent. Rather than hiring established stars, he assembled a scrappy group of unknown performers and aimed the show squarely at 18 to 34-year-olds. It was a bold move, relying on a younger audience to tune in and commit instead of playing it safe with familiar names.
The 2024 film Saturday Night depicts the chaos of the debut show, where the team were quite literally still building the stage up until moments before the cameras began rolling. But somehow, it worked, and not just in terms of ratings, rather launching a long list of incredible careers. From the debut cast, names like Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi became legends, and moving forward, it launched people like Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, Amy Poehler and many more. One name it didn’t catapult, though, was Jack Black, because he gave up on his audition before things had even started.
“I had an idea in mind that I never went and followed through with,” Black revealed on Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. He had a concept to combine two superheroes for the show’s infamously high-pressure audition.
To get on the show, performers go through a rigorous and pretty torturous process. First, there’s the classic self-tape, but then the show runs a unique and especially scary pressure-room situation where they have to bring in a character and perform like a little dancing monkey in front of the team.
They get barely any time, needing to impress immediately, but also, there was always the specific caveating rumour that Lorne Michaels would not laugh, no matter what, playing the cool, cold, hard-to-win audience, even if the rest of the team was in tatters.
With that high-pressure situation looming over, Black crumbled. “I was gonna come in as the Hulk and just jump around and do this weird slow motion kind of performance art dance where I would crush things with my foot and then do a mimed, the earth is cracking,” he explained as his concept, but even he didn’t believe in it.
“I was not gonna get in, and I knew that, but I had practised it in the mirror in my living room a few times,” he said, admitting the dream, “I never pulled the trigger”.
