The ‘Saturday Night Live’ star nobody could stand: “Everybody here is going to hell”
Throughout its five-decade run on the airwaves, Saturday Night Live has played host to countless behind-the-scenes feuds, but there was one star who seemed to rub everybody the wrong way.
Chevy Chase pissed off a few people during his time at Studio8H, and in keeping with his reputation as a magnanimous dickhead, he continued pissing off SNL stars decades after he left the show, but that’s to be expected when almost everyone he’s ever worked with has called him a prick.
Bill Murray ruffled a few feathers, Jeanne Garofalo loathed Adam Sandler, Norm Macdonald was never the biggest fan of Chris Kattan, and on it goes. Usually, those beefs were one-on-one, but when it came to Victoria Jackson, she struggled to find anyone who’d be willing to go out on a limb and defend her.
The actor and comedian, who spent six years on the show between 1986 and 1992, held some pretty conservative Christian beliefs. In isolation, folks are free to believe what they want to believe, but when they try to force it on their colleagues who aren’t interested, that’s when it becomes a problem.
One year, Jackson decided that it would be a good idea to gift every single SNL cast member an audiocassette of the Bible for Christmas, and every single one of those cast members sent it straight back. Al Franken, who spent two stints on the series, totalling 15 years, before becoming a United States senator, once cornered her to protest against how offended he was by her “ditzy” persona.
“Maybe I’m overcompensating,” she told him. “Because everybody here is dying and going to hell, and I’m supposed to tell them about Jesus.” Funnily enough, after Franken heard that explanation, “He never talked to me again.” After leaving the show, Jackson’s beliefs and opinions became even more controversial and occasionally despicable, not that she was held in high regard to begin with.
Nora Dunn admitted that the Bible stunt “tried my patience,” and also said, “I couldn’t work with her because we weren’t on the same page, ever; we weren’t even in the same book, we happened to be on the same show,” with Jan Hooks another SNL alum who went on the record with their distaste for her.
“I thought she had a pretty good gig,” Hooks mused. “I just have a particular repulsion to grown women who talk like little girls. She was like from Mars to me. I never really got her.” The cast members aren’t obligated to be friends, but it’s clear that Jackson didn’t make many of them during her six-year stint as a familiar face on the airwaves.
Her political and religious views only got more extreme after her departure, and perhaps it’s telling that when Saturday Night Live held its 40th anniversary reunion special in 2015, Jackson was one of the very few who didn’t get an invite.
