Danny McBride Says He Turned Down a Job Offer From ‘SNL’
In an alternate universe, it could have been Kenny Powers shouting, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” On a recent episode of Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, Danny McBride explained how the opportunity almost came to fruition when he made the Lorne Michaels-produced Hot Rod, “one of the first movies I ever did.”
“When we were shooting Hot Rod, I met Bill Hader, Andy Sandberg and Akiva (Schaffer) and Jorma (Taccone) and all those guys,” McBride said. “And they were just coming off their first year of SNL. And so it was cool. I liked those guys.”
The guys liked McBride as well. “Lorne actually prodded me to see if I was interested in joining the cast,” he told Von. “But it was really the same exact week that we sold Eastbound and Down. And so I was like, as much as I’m flattered, this is what I’m gonna go off and do.”
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It doesn’t sound like an easy decision. “I love SNL,” he confessed. “I grew up watching it.”
So it’s weird that he’s never hosted the show. Von was baffled — has McBride never been asked, or is hosting the show just not his thing? The comic actor sounded like he’d be up for a hosting gig, but the SNL stars have not yet aligned for the Righteous Gemstones star. He did catch Shane Gillis hosting a couple of weeks ago and thought the comic killed it, particularly with his CouplaBeers commercial spoof.
“That’s pretty funny shit,” laughed McBride. “I need a CouplaBeers in my personal life. I think that would fix a lot of things.”
While it’s true that McBride never took a cast job or landed a hosting gig, he has appeared on Saturday Night Live. There he is with his Hot Rod buddies in the Lonely Island digital short YOLO, snorting a mountain of coke. Nice work if you can get it.
The Lonely Island guys were “early investors” in McBride stock, according to Seth Meyers on their podcast breaking down Hot Rod. “McBride is so authentically McBride in the most wonderful way in this movie,” he explained.
“We let him improvise a ton,” says Samberg. “Him and Bill (Hader) both came in with alts and jokes they wanted to do. We knew they were both super-funny writers and they wrote a lot of funny shit for themselves.”
The ability to write super-funny shit for himself would have made McBride an SNL natural. Were there any hard feelings when he turned the show down to do his own thing?
“None of them ever talked to me ever again after that,” he told Von.
He was joking — probably.
