5 Times People Refused to Perform in ‘SNL’ Sketches
“The show must go on” is about as close to showbiz law as you can get, but that hasn’t stopped some Saturday Night Live performers from refusing to take the stage. Take Ruth Gordon, the 80-year-old host who said “No way!” to an Al Franken and Tom Davis sketch in which she’d keel over dead halfway through. Which, understandable.
Here are five other SNL cast members and guests who flat-out refused to participate in show sketches…
John Belushi
This article not your thing? Try these...
In the movie Saturday Night, Dan Aykroyd reluctantly acts in a sketch as a “cutie pie” getting catcalled by female construction workers. Aykroyd played the beefcake in the sketch alongside Lily Tomlin, but he wasn’t the first choice.
Writers Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts wrote the role for Belushi, who gave the part a big thumbs-down since he was self-conscious about tiny shorts that would show off his weight. Belushi, who sometimes ranted about the show’s female writers, also refused to appear in other Shuster/Beatts sketches, according to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. He was the original choice for Todd in the Nerds sketches, which instead became one of Bill Murray’s signature characters.
Paris Hilton
What did Tina Fey think of Hilton when she hosted in 2005? “She’s a piece of shit,” Fey told Howard Stern. “She’s so dumb, so proud of how dumb she is.”
Legendary SNL writer Jim Downey wrote a very fun sketch for Hilton, Fey said. The premise: Lorne Michaels supposedly had no idea that Hilton had a sex tape, only finding out at the last minute. “You can’t host the show!” Michaels would have said. “We have standards here!”
The joke, of course, was that the sex tape was the only reason Hilton was famous enough to host SNL in the first place. According to Fey, Hilton not only refused to do the sketch but locked herself in her dressing room in protest. “Nobody does that!” Fey said.
Instead, Hilton pitched sketches in which she could make fun of other women she hated. “You should write a sketch where I play Jessica Simpson, and she’s fat.”
Nora Dunn
When Andrew Dice Clay was enlisted to host, Dunn refused to appear in the show, calling a press conference to let the world know she was protesting Clay’s misogynistic comedy.
“It would have been nice if she’d called me,” Lorne Michaels says in oral history Live From New York. “Nora painted herself into a corner, I think. We’re not one big happy family, you’ve probably figured that out. That said, everybody plays by a set of rules.”
Those rules included showing up for work. Dunn never did another show after her walkout.
Donald Trump
SNL writer Bryan Tucker told the Huffington Post about a sketch Trump refused to do in 2015. “We did do a dress-rehearsal sketch where he was the Giving Tree, and the Giving Tree was giving fruit to a boy,” Tucker said. “And eventually the Giving Tree got completely chopped down and was a stump, and Trump was a neighboring tree saying, ‘You’re a sucker, you’re getting played, you should not be giving things to these people.’ And Trump had to stand in a tree with his face looking out of the hole of this tree, and he did not like that. I don’t think he enjoyed looking like a tree. He was not into it and it showed, and it did not get a lot of laughs.”
Kenan Thompson
Thompson played his share of Black women on the show — from Whoopi Goldberg to Oprah — but by 2013, he’d had enough. SNL hadn’t employed a Black female comedian since Maya Rudolph’s departure in 2007 and Thompson was done dressing in drag to fill the void. “Maybe (Jay Pharaoh) will do it or something, but even he doesn’t really want to do it,” he told TV Guide.
Thompson’s refusal to play Black women — and public shaming of Lorne Michaels — eventually led to the hiring of Sasheer Zamata and Leslie Jones.