Adrien Brody Says He Isn’t Banned From ‘Saturday Night Live’ After All

Despite what every Saturday Night Live fan has believed for the last quarter of a century, Golden Globe winner Adrien Brody says that it’s all irie between him and 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Over the weekend, the 51-year-old actor won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for his performance as a visionary architect and a Jewish immigrant to America in the epic drama The Brutalist. Sadly for cinephiles, The Brutalist is only playing in roughly three theaters in the Western Hemisphere, so very few movie fans have actually seen Brody’s award-winning performance, which puts it in stark contrast to his also brutal 2001 hosting appearance on Saturday Night Live when he introduced musical guest Sean Paul with a bizarre, stereotypical and offensive impression of a Jamaican person that has since been described as “just this side of Black face.”

Immediately following that infamous Saturday night, Brody’s ill-conceived impersonation and his creative struggles with the SNL staff became the stuff of TV comedy legend, and numerous outlets reported that Brody’s purportedly improvised and definitely insensitive performance earned him a lifetime ban from the show. However, in a recent Vulture interview, the actor attempted to set the record straight by explaining that no one from Lorne Michaels’ office ever officially notified him of a hosting embargo — I guess the three little birds on his doorstep didn’t deliver the message.

While SNL fans have long believed that Brody appearing onstage in a dreadlocked wig and energetically spouting what he apparently believes to be Jamaican Patois was an improvised, unapproved and ban-worthy decision made by Brody alone, the actor insisted that the character actually did have Michaels’ stamp of approval — he just felt the rhythm and the rhyme a little too hard for SNL’s taste. “I think Lorne wasn’t happy with me embellishing a bit, but they allowed me to,” Brody claimed. “I thought that was a safe space to do that, weirdly.” 

Brody did confirm what has been known to SNL fans for decades about the creative friction that plagued the week leading up to his hosting gig, admitting of the tumultuous brainstorming process between him and the SNL writers, “They were all literally agape from me pitching.” Then-head writer Tina Fey has since openly discussed how Brody’s ideas bombed in the writers’ room, which caused the host to become surly and withdrawn from the creative process.

Despite the poor showing, however, Brody still believes that the supposed “ban” on him hosting SNL isn’t set in stone. “But I also have never been invited back on,” the actor admitted. “So I don’t know what to tell you.”

So according to Brody, he didn’t actually break SNL’s strict “no improv” rule when he introduced Sean Paul with a borderline minstrel show, and the only reason he hasn’t been back to host SNL is simply that he was bad at it. 

Don’t let them fool ya.