Here’s the Would-Be ‘SNL’ Host That Lorne Michaels Says Is His ‘White Whale’

Saturday Night Live has seen so many mega-celebrities deliver monologues and do their best impressions on the Studio 8H stage over the years, but Lorne Michaels still thinks about the few superstars who passed on the opportunity — thank god he was able to cross Elon Musk off the list.

Within the last decade, the inscrutable decision-making process that leads to the selection of each week’s Saturday Night Live host has seemed especially chaotic. Michaels and his team drew heavy criticism for booking Donald Trump to host the show in the midst of Trump’s first presidential campaign back in 2015, and the aforementioned tech billionaire and propaganda platformer’s performance on SNL in 2021 was cringey and unfunny at best, and shamefully out-of-touch at worst. When former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley made a cameo in a cold open during the most recent season of SNL, star cast member Bowen Yang publicly side-eyed his superiors for roping the cast into their own muddled politics, showing that SNL’s selection of celebrity guests is as confusing and frustrating to the cast as it is to the viewers.

But for all the demagogues and dirtbags whom SNL has invited to perform the opening monologue, the one right-leaning public figure who actually might put up a decent performance sadly passed on his many chances to host the show, and Michaels is still dealing with the disappointment. During a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Michaels said that his “white whale” for hosts whom he tried to book but never accepted the invitation is filmmaking legend and libertarian figurehead Clint Eastwood.

Go ahead, Clint, do it for SNL Season 50 — make Lorne’s day.

“We tried very hard for Clint, particularly in the ‘70s,” Michaels admitted of the one would-be host that got away, noting how industry norms may have kept the Dirty Harry star away from SNL. “Movie stars in that period did not do television. Occasionally they did with us, but there was a real chance of being humiliated in front of millions of people and we don’t pay anything, so you’d have to do it because you were game for it.”

Eastwood may seem like a strange pick for SNL, seeing as, in 2024, the Hollywood legend is much better known for stern, stoic, self-serious performances in gritty Westerns and his awkward attempts at advocating for conservative causes than for any kind of comedic ability. However, there was once a period of Eastwood’s career that overlapped with the early years of SNL when he had a bankable sense of humor — Eastwood’s 1978 action-comedy film Every Which Way But Loose is still one of the biggest commercial successes of his career, as was the movie’s 1980 sequel Any Which Way You Can. 

Ultimately, though Eastwood very well could have been one of the best classic SNL hosts back in his prime, Michaels tries not to lose sleep over the Man with No Name. “In the end, pretty much everyone has (come on), so there’s no one out there where I go, ‘Oh, if that person would just do it, my life would be complete,’” Michaels said of his hit rate with dream hosts.

After all, once you’ve seen Musk's killer Wario impression, your life feels so complete you kind of want it to be over.