The Missed Cue That Probably Cost This ‘SNL’ Cast Member His Job

Jon Rudnitsky never got much of a chance to make a splash on Saturday Night Live when he was a one-and-done featured player in Season 41. One reason for his abbreviated tenure? It could be this unforced error in a Peter Dinklage sketch, Rudnitsky said on the SNL Stories podcast, as reported by LateNighter.

The “Mafia Meeting” sketch, more popularly known as “Space Pants,” gets off to a weird start with mobster Bobby Moynihan waiting at an empty table in a cocktail lounge. Beck Bennett ushers in a solo Pete Davidson, which makes Moynihan’s next line nonsensical: “You two boys are hard to track down, almost as if you were avoiding me.” You two boys? Where’s the other one?

Moynihan and Davidson carry on as best they can for a few lines, at which point Rudnitsky mysteriously appears in the seat next to Davidson. “Where were you?” Moynihan ad-libs as the new character joins mid-scene.

Yeah, where was he? Rudnitsky was ready to go, “fully in wardrobe, in my wig and everything,” he insisted. “I just never heard my name get called. In fact, I was standing next to Vanessa (Bayer) and Leslie (Jones), and they didn’t tap me or anything.”

Not that it was Jones’ job to push him onto stage during a live sketch. The problem, Rudnitsky explained, was that he assumed the show was going into a commercial break because it had just done back-to-back sketches. “Very rare do you see three sketches in a row.”

Then he saw “Space Pants” begin on the monitor, and he thought, “Oh, fuck!”

Rudnitsky sprinted across the studio, where the stage manager momentarily held him back from entering the scene. The director, understandably, wanted the camera on Moynihan when the tardy actor slipped into the sketch. Viewers, Rudnitsky knew, would still be confused. “I’m sure people were thinking like, ‘Oh this is gonna be a sketch about a guy who’s late a lot?’ and then it goes off into Space Pants land,” he explained.

Rudnitsky knew he’d messed up. He sought out castmate Kenan Thompson, who was always good for a hug and a kind word when sketches didn’t go according to plan. But this time, Thompson gave it to him straight.

Missing a cue during a live sketch — “That’s happened before, right?” Rudnitsky asked. 

“Not like that, man,” Thompson replied. 

Making SNL history for being late for a live sketch? “This is probably where I lost my job,” Rudnitsky said before coming up with even more rationales for his dismissal. “There are several reasons I can think of that I got fired. Most of them is that I bombed almost every table read. That will do it, if you don’t show up and do the job. I think also I brought too many of my friends from New Jersey and my mom to every afterparty.”

But he didn’t point the finger at anyone else as to why he flubbed one of his only chances to headline a sketch. “It’s because I’m an idiot.”