Timothée Chalamet Is Following in the Footsteps of One of the Most Disastrous ‘SNL’ Hosts of All Time

It was recently announced that A Complete Unknown star Timothée Chalamet will host the January 25th episode of Saturday Night Live – but he will only be the second-best Bob Dylan impressionist in Studio 8H that night.

Weirdly, Chalamet won’t just be hosting, he will also be the show’s musical guest. While Chalamet isn’t a professional musician, he did do his own singing and guitar-playing in the Dylan biopic, suggesting that he may be performing on SNL as Dylan. 

He’ll probably just sing “Like a Rolling Stone” or something, but he could also honor SNL history by belting out some of Dylan’s born-again Christian tunes.

Interestingly enough, Chalamet’s booking shares a number of parallels with an episode from the show’s distant past — and hopefully this one won’t be quite so disastrous.

While it’s not unusual for music stars to pull double-duty as both host and musical guest, it’s less common for non-professional musicians to cover both jobs. In March 1979, Gary Busey hosted the show, and although he wasn’t the official musical guest, in the closing moments of the show, he did take the stage and perform a song. 

Like Chalamet, Busey had just received a lot of critical acclaim for his work in a high-profile rock star biopic: Busey played Buddy Holly in the aptly-named The Buddy Holly Story. When Chalamet hosts in a few weeks, he will, in all likelihood, have been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actor category. Similarly, Busey was nominated for playing Holly (he ultimately lost to Jon Voight for the Vietnam War drama Coming Home).

Oddly enough, when Busey sang on SNL, he was backed by two musicians with connections to Dylan’s electric period: Rick Danko, a founding member of The Band, previously The Hawks, who first backed Dylan on his first electric tour in 1966; and Paul Butterfield, who played at the legendary Newport Folk Festival on the same day that Dylan famously “went electric” (playing with several members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band). 

And it’s been argued that the festival’s condescending attitude toward Butterfield’s band is what inspired Dylan to pivot to an electric set, as seen in the climax of A Complete Unknown. 

But Busey’s time at SNL was far from smooth. According to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Busey was “living the rock and roll life with a vengeance” at the time, so much so that Lorne Michaels had to assign a staff member to “keep an eye on him,” which wasn’t easy. At one point she had to get a key to Busey’s hotel room and drag him to the studio for rehearsal. And on the Friday before the show, she had to enlist a security guard to look for him after he disappeared. 

Worse, John Belushi reportedly had a “little trick” that he “sometimes played on vulnerable hosts,” taking them drinking for several nights so that they’d be “nursing a three-day hangover” during the show (Belushi, on the other hand, would refresh himself with a steambath and a massage).

After falling prey to Belushi’s influences, and his own not-so-great impulses, Busey disappeared yet again on Saturday night. He was nowhere to be found at 11:28 p.m., just two minutes before the show was scheduled to air. Jane Curtin said that he went out “for a pizza.” 

Busey finally showed up, just in time for the first sketch, claiming that he had merely left for a Coke. As OneSNLaDay.com pointed out, Busey appeared to be sweating and out of breath at the start of the cold open.

We’re guessing that Chalamet likely won’t bail on the show to get a soda.