SNL boss Lorne Michaels would have invited Sinéad O’Connor to perform on show’s 50th anniversary
Lorne Michaels, the boss of Saturday Night Live, has said he would have invited Sinéad O’Connor to perform on the show’s 50th anniversary celebrations earlier this year, had she still been around.
Michaels was speaking in a recent interview with Puck News when he made reference to Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard’s performance of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ at the celebrations, and said: “If [O’Connor] were still alive, I would have asked her to sing that song.”
O’Connor has an embedded history with SNL, with the most famous and controversial moment of her career coming during her appearance on the show in October 1992, in which she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II in protest of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
This caused worldwide uproar which followed O’Connor for the rest of her life, most famously causing her to almost be booed offstage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in New York, two weeks after the event.
Despite Michaels’ somewhat celebratory stance on the singer nowadays, two years after her passing in July 2023, he has also been an outspoken critic of O’Connor’s SNL incident ever since he took over the running of the show the year after it happened.
He previously told Spin at the time: “I thought [it] was sort of the wrong place for it, I thought her behavior was inappropriate,” Michaels said. “Because it was difficult to do two comedy sketches after it, and also it was dishonest because she didn’t tell us she was going to do it.”
However, Michaels’ perception of O’Connor has evidently changed over time, as he equally admitted earlier this year, in light of the 50th anniversary celebrations: “There was a part of me that just admired the bravery of what she’d done, and also the absolute sincerity of it.”
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