David Spade Can’t Believe That ‘SNL’ Cast Members Text With Lorne Michaels
Father sure doesn’t punish the kids like he did back when we were young. At least, that’s what David Spade believes about current cast members’ relationship with Saturday Night Live daddy Lorne Michaels.
On the latest episode of Spade’s Superfly podcast with Dana Carvey, the two SNL veterans expressed utter shock about the state of Michaels/cast relations. “Sarah Sherman's like, ‘Then I texted Lorne and said, ‘Why did my sketch get cut?’” said Spade. “I’m like, ‘You text Lorne?’”
Spade was floored at the sheer audacity of a cast member communicating with Michaels without sitting outside his office for hours.
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“As a cast member?” exclaimed an equally flabbergasted Carvey. “During the show?”
Spade’s incredulity didn’t end there. He told another Sherman story about the Church Lady sketch he appeared in as Hunter Biden last month. Michaels got on a microphone (another “we didn’t have those back then!” moment) to deliver notes to the cast. “He starts reading,” remembered Spade. “And then he goes, ‘Sarah (because she's Matt Gaetz), you're not in the light enough. Can you face more towards the middle?’”
“And she goes, ‘I’ll try,’” Spade imitated in an irritated Sherman nasal.
The nerve! “How about, ‘Yes sir!’” admonished Spade, remembering his own days in the Marines, er, as an SNL cast member. Without intending to do so, Carvey and Spade had fallen into one of Carvey’s old characters, Grumpy Old Man. “In my day, we didn’t have cellular phones and the freedom to speak freely. Lorne Michaels was a dictator… and we liked it!”
To be fair, Michaels does appear to have mellowed with age. Back in Carvey’s day, the SNL producer refused to allow Carvey and Kevin Nealon to appear as Hans and Franz in TV commercials promoting Nike. He even forbade SNL cast members from doing commercials as themselves. These days, SNL characters like the gals from NPR’s Delicious Dish, the Target Lady and Wayne and Garth cash big checks for endorsing products.
Michaels is also more generous with time off. He wouldn’t allow Jon Lovitz to take two weeks to finish a movie in the early 1990s, causing Lovitz to leave the show. “For me personally, it’s kind of upsetting because I really wanted to stay,” Lovitz said in SNL oral history Live From New York. Yet, by the 2010s, stars like Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon went missing for months to pursue passion projects.
It doesn’t seem fair to guys like Carvey and Spade that they had to play by the old rules. But you know what the kids say — if you don’t like something about SNL, you can always text Lorne Michaels.
