The Story Behind Christopher Walken’s Other Great ‘SNL’ Sketch
It’s a testament to how great of an SNL host Christopher Walken is that “More Cowbell!” and “The Continental” are really just scratching the surface in terms of his most memorable sketches. Case in point: “Centaur Job Interview,” a bit in which he plays a hospital administrator interviewing candidates for a new job and among the applicants is Chris Parnell as a centaur.
While Parnell masterfully played it straight as a guy who wants a job — and who just happens to be centaur — Walken pelted him with a barrage of embarrassing questions about his mythical physique. Questions like, “Can I ride you?,” “Could you enter yourself in the Kentucky Derby?” and “Do you have sex with horses or human women?”
“Will Ferrell and Adam McKay wrote the sketch,” Parnell tells me. “But rather than playing the centaur part himself, Will thought it should be me.”
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Parnell says the sketch came to him fully formed and that he merely “had to figure out the right way to approach the material, which was to take it seriously like a normal job interview. I had to answer these weird questions from Walken as though they weren’t that weird. Of course those would be the questions a centaur would be asked in a job interview from a human.”
“I don’t think I ever once made eye contact with Walken because he was just looking at the cards,” Parnell continues. “No harm there, I don’t blame him — it was a lot of words, especially for him — but I always tried to memorize all my lines and look right at the person. I’m sure he glanced at me, but he was mostly glued to the cards.”
Regardless, the sketch was a big success. Or as Parnell puts it, “It’s such a funny piece and so well written. That’s the reason why it continues to live on — that and because it was Christopher Walken.”
