Donald Glover Says ‘SNL’ and ‘30 Rock’ Were Ruled By Fear

Don’t get Donald Glover wrong — he had a great experience writing for 30 Rock. But when it came time to put together his own writers’ room for Atlanta, he said on this week’s episode of Hot Ones, “one thing at 30 Rock that I didn’t want as much of — because I feel like it was a thing from SNL — was fear.” 

A writers’ room on a comedy show is inherently a scary place, Glover explained. He laughed as he remembered a seemingly innocuous moment from his early sitcom experience. “One time I came into the 30 Rock room, and I had a new hat on,” he said. “I just had a hat. They came in, and one of the writers goes, ‘Hat.’ And I couldn’t wear the hat! They’re just funny people. I was like, ‘You’re right. I was trying something new. I’m ashamed.’” 

Glover wanted a different vibe. “I just didn’t want any fear in my room because if we’re trying to make a show for somebody else, we’re fucked,” he explained. “So everything I’ve ever made is just something I would watch. You can’t make it for somebody else.”

The Mr. & Mrs. Smith star has a complicated relationship with both 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live. Glover auditioned for SNL twice, in 2007 and 2009, getting turned down each time. He later told GQ he was grateful he didn’t get the job, calling the missed opportunities “a dodged bullet.”

“Me being on SNL would’ve killed me. I got friends who made it on SNL and, at the time, I was like, damn,” he said. “But if I got on SNL, my career wouldn’t have happened.” 

Glover was impossibly young when he got the writing job at 30 Rock, still working as an RA in his NYU dorm. “It definitely didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there,” he said in his GQ profile. “I used to have stress dreams every night where I was doing cartwheels on the top of a New York skyscraper with the other writers watching me.”

One reason he likely experienced an unhealthy bout of imposter syndrome? Tina Fey admitted that being Black was the main reason Glover got the job. (An NBC diversity initiative allowed Fey to hire Glover for free.) “There is no animosity between us or anything like that, but she said it herself. It was a diversity thing,” Glover told the men’s magazine. “The last two people who were fighting for the job were me and Kenya Barris. I didn’t know it was between me and him until later. He hit me one day and he was like, ‘I hated you for years!’”

Glover later got the last laugh when he was tapped to host SNL in 2019, telling the audience how the show turned him away — twice. “That’s not a joke. I’m still pissed,” he said. “But it all worked out for me.”