The ‘Saturday Night Live’ star nobody liked: “Maybe I’d been somewhat of an asshole”
At some point in their lives, almost everyone will be forced to work with somebody they can’t stand, and there’s not much they can do about it. The cast of Saturday Night Live felt the exact same way about one cast member, who didn’t seem to realise they’d been that guy until they left.
Throwing a bunch of comedians into close proximity to each other, especially in a high-pressure environment like weekly live television, has the potential to cause friction. After all, even though they’re technically working together for the greater good, everybody wants to be the star of the show in their own way.
Add a team of writers, a string of producers, and a cabal of network executives into the mix, and it’s easy to see why SNL has frequently shown itself to be a combustible environment during its 50-year run on the airwaves. It might be one of Hollywood’s most trusted proving grounds for the next wave of comedic talent, but it isn’t always sunshine and roses behind the scenes.
The long-running sketch staple has given rise to countless feuds over the years, some of which devolved into physical violence, but despite being at the heart of more than one of them, Chevy Chase didn’t seem to realise that he might have been the problem until after he’d packed his bags and left during the middle of the second season and returned as a guest host for the first time in 1978.
“I realised when I left that maybe I hadn’t been such a great guy,” he confessed in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “Maybe we weren’t so close. Maybe I’d been somewhat of an asshole. I left with self-doubts. And, as time went on, it was a little easier to do it over the years because, you know, it was water under the bridge.”
His battles with Bill Murray have become the stuff of SNL legend, but he was far from the only person that Chase managed to irritate. Dick Ebersol recalled John Belushi becoming “radically pissed off” with his cohort trying to muscle his way toward being the focal point of the show’s first season, and Dan Aykroyd confirmed that his Blues Brothers co-star “had his problems with Chevy.”
Jane Curtin, another original cast member, compared trying to write sketches with Chase as having “pieces of your arm bitten off and then you leave,” with Lorne Michaels playing intermediary. Alan Zweibel, who was part of the writing staff, suggested that there “had come a point in the first season where Chevy wasn’t writing for the show as much as he was writing for Chevy,” which “didn’t help things” in terms of fostering a strong bond with his colleagues, particularly Murray.
Zweibel also recalled “ill feelings” between Chase and SNL veteran Al Franken, Terry Sweeney called him a “monster,” he berated a fresh-faced Robert Downey Jr, and Tim Meadows, who said he was a huge fan of the actor, compared his frequent returns as host to “watching a car accident over and over again just watching him deal with people,” so it goes without saying that he wasn’t the easiest guy to be around.
Will Ferrell called him the worst host he’d ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and none of it should come as much of a surprise when there’s a long list of people who never set foot on SNL that Chase managed to piss off in one way or another.
