When Jason Bateman was attacked by a chimpanzee: “Tried to bite my entire nose off”
These days, Jason Bateman is loving life as an in-demand director.
Having been a member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) since the age of 18, making him the youngest person on their books at the time, he really broke through as a filmmaker with the TV show Ozark. A crime drama about a family who become entangled with a drug cartel, the series (in which Bateman stars alongside Laura Linney) received acclaim from right across the spectrum. Sure, a dark drugs drama might impress the critics, but Bateman’s first home will always be comedy.
Right back to his days as a child star, he always had the ability to make people laugh. He appeared on the sitcom The Hogan Family as a youngster, before eventually graduating to one of the greatest laughathons in American TV history, Arrested Development. As Michael Bluth, Bateman was the reluctant straight man in a world full of some of the maddest characters ever written for a sitcom. Ozark might have won him a Golden Globe, but the Bluth family banana stand will define his legacy, whether he likes it or not.
Naturally, like many great funnymen and women, Bateman was asked to host Saturday Night Live. He’s overseen the popular sketch show twice, once in 2005 and then again in 2020. On that second occasion, he told the crowd a ‘funny’ story about the last time he’d been in Studio 8H, and it suddenly became clear why he’d taken so long to come back.
“Something kinda weird happened last time I hosted,” the Ozark star recalled to audiences. “I was in a sketch called ‘Monkeys Throwing Poop at Celebrities’, which naturally had a monkey in it. Now, if the show did that sketch today, they would use a puppet or a kid dressed as a monkey for safety. But back then they used a real, adult, male chimpanzee. This was 2005. Things were loose.”
He went on to explain that, while the sketch itself went off without a hitch, things didn’t run so smoothly later in the show. The chimpanzee joined the rest of the cast for the closing credits, in which Bateman bent down to tell his fellow primate that he had done a good job. In that moment, the animal “unhinged his jaw, flashed his teeth, and tried to bite my entire nose off”. Luckily for him, he was able to pull away just in time to save himself from a bout of amateur plastic surgery.
They might seem like cuddly playthings, but chimps are no joke. There have been several studies that indicate that apes are naturally violent and, when placed in captivity, these highly intelligent creatures prove that to be true. There are many reports of so-called ‘pets’ assaulting their owners, with attacks on the face being commonplace. Elvis Presley once owned a chimp, who used to get drunk and trash his dressing rooms on film sets. Honestly, what’s wrong with a hamster? Or a pet rock?
There’s a saying about not working with animals in show business for a reason. Bateman was inches away from having a permanent reminder that our animal friends are not to be messed with, even if they are really cute.
