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Which SNL Cast Members Couldn't Stand Each Other
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00:00Saturday Night Live is probably the most stressful show on TV. And with that stress,
00:05of course, actors and staff will occasionally butt heads. Even if the feuds managed to stay
00:11backstage, they definitely had an impact on the show. Here are the members who couldn't stand each
00:17other.
00:18Chevy Chase and Bill Murray were among the earliest and most notable cast members of
00:23Saturday Night Live, but they weren't regulars together. According to Far Out,
00:28Chase left the series after about a year, and Murray was his replacement.
00:32Chase made his triumphant return to SNL as a guest host in 1978,
00:38coming in with what he called in the oral history Live from New York a, quote,
00:42egocentric attitude. As a result, Chase clashed with multiple cast members,
00:48particularly Murray, who knew him from when they worked on National Lampoon, per decider.
00:53After many nasty things were said, Murray made a verbal jab at Chase,
00:57whose marriage was in a rocky place. Chase retorted by commenting that Murray's scarred
01:02face looked like the surface of the moon. Moments before SNL went live on the air,
01:07Chase cornered Murray and John Belushi's dressing room and a physical fight broke out,
01:12with Belushi having to separate them. News of the fight entered SNL lore, and when Chase
01:17hosted the show again in 1980, he and Murray attempted to dispel the so-called rumors by performing
01:23I Shot the Sheriff together. First-season SNL breakout star Chevy Chase left the show after
01:30slightly more than one season, and very quickly started appearing in movies. He returned to the
01:35show to host eight times, including once in 1985 when he openly and viciously antagonized multiple
01:42cast members. Chase approached Robert Downey Jr., son of indie filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.,
01:48and according to Live From New York, said,
01:51"'Didn't your father used to be a successful director?'
01:54Whatever happened to him? Boy, he sure died, you know, he sure went to hell."
01:58Downey Sr. was still alive, it's worth noting.
02:01He saved some truly audacious vitriol for Terry Sweeney, the first openly gay cast member in SNL history.
02:08In Live From New York, Sweeney recalled Chase approaching him with a repulsive idea,
02:13with Chase reportedly saying,
02:15"'I've got an idea for a sketch for you. How about we say you have AIDS and we weigh you every week?'
02:20Producers were so incensed by Chase's comments that they forced him to say sorry,
02:26which Sweeney said made Chase furious."
02:29The last time Chevy Chase showed his face at Saturday Night Live was a cameo in a March 2013
02:35episode. That's more than a year before Pete Davidson joined the cast of the show,
02:40and even though their paths didn't cross, they still managed to forge a feud.
02:44In a September 2018 interview with The Washington Post,
02:48Chase profanely criticized the show that made him famous.
02:52"'But I'll just say, maybe off the record, I'm amazed that Lauren has gone so low,
02:56I had to watch a little of it, I just couldn't effing believe it.'"
02:59A few days after the Post article, Davidson was a guest on Howard Stern's satellite radio show,
03:05and the host asked him to respond, which he did, saying,
03:08"'F*** Chevy Chase. I hate that dude.'" Davidson noted that Chase seemingly ruined, quote,
03:14"'A really big career' with his attitude." What really bugged him was how disrespectful
03:19Chase's comments were to SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels.
03:24Eddie Murphy is arguably the most prominent star to ever have their career launched by Saturday Night
03:29Live. Thanks to his domination of the show in the early 1980s, the hilarious and charismatic
03:36young Murphy went on to star in mega-hits like Beverly Hills Cop and The Nutty Professor.
03:41And unlike most every other SNL cast member turned A-list film actor, it wasn't until 2019 that Murphy
03:48returned to the show to host. The main reason for his absence? Mid-90s SNL cast member David Spade.
03:55In a 1995 installment of his snarky talking head segment Spade in America, Spade made a quip over a
04:02photo of Murphy, star of back-to-back flops Beverly Hills Cop 3 and Vampire in Brooklyn.
04:08"'Look, children, it's a falling star. Make a wish.'"
04:13"'Yeah, yes, that's right.'"
04:16Murphy told Rolling Stone in 2011 of Spade's cheap shot,
04:20"'What really irritated me about it at the time was that it was a career shot.'"
04:25In the mid-'90s, Saturday Night Live underwent a major cast overhaul, bringing in new talent like
04:31Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Chris Catan, with a holdover from the old cast being Norm MacDonald,
04:37primarily the show's caustic Deadpan Weekend Update anchor. When Rolling Stone profiled the new SNL
04:43ensemble in 1997, MacDonald made a point of going after Catan, derisively questioning the Mango
04:50portrayer's sexuality, seemingly out of nowhere. MacDonald also went on to say that he didn't think
04:56Catan was funny. Catan initially brushed off his co-star's comments, jokingly responding
05:02with his own insult to Norm. In 1999, after MacDonald had left SNL and returned to host,
05:09Catan, still a cast member, did not appear in the episode, with a source telling The Observer,
05:15"'They had a very acrimonious relationship. Norm would rip Catan to his face."
05:20And for his part, Catan would reportedly pester and berate MacDonald just before he'd go on air.
05:26In the late 90s, Clueless director Amy Heckerling was in negotiations to helm A Night at the Roxbury,
05:32starring Chris Catan and Will Ferrell as those two odious dance club regulars who bobbed their heads
05:38to Hathaway's What Is Love in a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch. In his memoir, Baby Don't Hurt Me,
05:44Catan claimed that SNL and A Night at the Roxbury producer Lorne Michaels was so desperate to sign
05:50Heckerling that he encouraged Catan to accept her romantic advances, which he had
05:55previously rejected. Catan said that he did as Michaels had asked, and began an affair with
06:00Heckerling, who ultimately produced but did not direct A Night at the Roxbury. Once production on
06:06the movie was completed, Catan wrote that Ferrell didn't speak to him for months, then confronted
06:11him backstage at SNL, and Catan recalled him saying,
06:15"'I didn't call you back because I didn't want to talk to you. I don't want to be your friend anymore.
06:20I'm going to be professional and still work with you on the show, but that's it.'"
06:24Ferrell didn't explicitly state his reasons,
06:27but Catan understood that his co-star was disgusted by his strange affair with Heckerling.
06:33In 2009, years removed from Saturday Night Live, Tracy Morgan published his first book,
06:39I Am The New Black. He reflected on his time at SNL in the mid-'90s and early-2000s,
06:45and dished the dirt on which cast members he didn't like, Chris Catan and Sherry Oteri, writing,
06:51"'All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Catan now? Where's Sherry Oteri now?'
06:56According to Gawker, when Morgan recorded the audiobook version of I Am The New Black,
07:01he elaborated and improvised on his SNL friends and enemies,
07:06noting that he considers Will Ferrell, Colin Quinn, and Molly Shannon his friends,
07:10but definitely not Oteri and Catan. Tracy Morgan was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1996 to
07:182003, his tenure largely overlapping that of young comedian and impressionist Jimmy Fallon. While
07:25Fallon had some breakout recurring characters, he's likely best and most remembered for collapsing
07:30into giggles or hysterical laughter in one sketch after another. It can be argued that laughing,
07:36or breaking as it's also known, can ruin a sketch, and Morgan certainly thought Fallon's behavior did
07:42just that. In a 2007 interview with Penthouse, Morgan suggested that Fallon would crack up on
07:49purpose to put the spotlight on himself, and also that he hated it, saying,
07:54"'That's taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you like,
07:58"'Oh, look at me, I'm the cute one.'"
08:00Morgan also pointed out that Fallon didn't laugh through sketches they appeared in together,
08:05because Morgan told him not to. This feud seems to have resolved at least.
08:09Morgan was a guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon 11 times,
08:13and has appeared on Fallon's The Tonight Show on six occasions.
08:18In 2011, The Oprah Winfrey Show hosted a large group of Saturday Night Live all-stars,
08:23including Tina Fey, Dana Carvey, and Jane Curtin. When Winfrey asked about gender politics in the
08:29workplace, Curtin, one of the original members in 1975 and one of the first Weekend Update co-hosts,
08:36described an atmosphere of sexism and hostility to women.
08:40"'Jane, you ignorant s*****.'"
08:42According to Curtin, co-star John Belushi believed that, quote,
08:46"'Women are just fundamentally not funny,' and alleged that the late SNL star intentionally
08:52sabotaged pieces that were written by women. Curtin reiterated her experiences with Belushi on Watch
08:58What Happens Live in 2018, explaining that the actor was among a group of men on the show who
09:04thought that, quote, "'Women should not have been on SNL.'"
09:07When host Andy Cohen asked if Belushi thought SNL standout Gilda Radner had comedy chops,
09:13she said that he did, but,
09:15"'He didn't classify her as a woman. She was Gilda.'"
09:19Dana Carvey was probably the biggest star on SNL in the late 1980s. When Mike Myers joined the show in
09:251989, he brought along a character he'd originated on Canadian television and recruited Carvey to play
09:32his sidekick. Together, they made comedy magic, Wayne's World, a cable access show hosted by Myers'
09:39Wayne Campbell and Carvey's Garth Algar. The sketches performed so well that they spawned two movies.
09:46In 1997, Myers created another comedy movie franchise with Austin Powers' International Man of Mystery.
09:53In the parody of 1960s British spy movies, Myers portrayed swinging, groovy, super-spy Austin
10:00Powers, as well as the villain Dr. Evil, who spoke with a pronounced and exaggerated Canadian accent.
10:07According to Carvey on The Howard Stern Show, Myers' Dr. Evil voice was his take on Carvey's
10:13impersonation of their SNL boss Lorne Michaels. He also allegedly took Dr. Evil's habit of raising
10:19a pinky to his lips from Carvey's Michaels impression, saying,
10:23"'Lorne doesn't do that, but somehow it fit. The pinky thing I did.'"
10:27Carvey resented Myers for years, and the latter did admit to The Hollywood Reporter,
10:32"'The Dr. Evil voice is a little bit Lorne Michaels. There are no two ways about it.'"
10:37Carvey never confronted Myers, but he claims he did go over it with his therapist.
10:43Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels took what became a five-year leave of absence from his
10:48show in the early 1980s, and NBC put associate producer Gene Domanian in charge. When Michaels
10:55left, so did the entire cast, many of them with SNL from its beginning, meaning Domanian could hire a
11:02new roster of players, per Live from New York. According to Doug Hill and Jeffrey Weingrad's Saturday
11:08night, Domanian was most excited about Charles Rocket and predicted he'd be the biggest star
11:13among the bunch. But the breakout star of the early 80s SNL was not Charles Rocket. It was Eddie Murphy.
11:20Perhaps resentful of the success and popularity that came so easily to his co-star, who had joined
11:26the show at age 19, Rocket was openly scornful and dismissive of Murphy around the SNL offices.
11:34Nora Dunn and Victoria Jackson were among the small group of women to be a part of the
11:38Saturday Night Live cast in the mid-to-late 1980s. They didn't do much for each other,
11:44and the rest of their co-stars seemingly didn't like either actor as well,
11:48with Jon Lovitz recounting in Live from New York,
11:51"'Dunn fought with a lot of people. She fought with me the first year,
11:55and then the second year she started again, and I said,
11:57I'm not going through this with you for another year.'"
12:00He then recalled a time when a sketch with Dunn and Dana Carvey ended with those two actors,
12:05quote,
12:05"...just screaming at each other."
12:07Jackson thought Dunn was the single biggest flaw on SNL — well, her and another co-star.
12:13An SNL producer gathered the cast of this era for a meeting to pinpoint problems with the show,
12:19and Jackson recalled,
12:20"'No one was saying anything. I stood up and told everyone what was wrong with the show was
12:25those two women. I pointed to Nora and Jan Hooks, and all the things they did bad. They didn't
12:30cooperate in sketches and they slammed doors in people's faces and backbite and backstab and all
12:36that." Dunn and Hooks slipped out of the room, and Jackson called out the rest of the cast for
12:41not backing her up. That reportedly prompted Carvey to quip,
12:44"'You didn't hear anyone disagreeing, did you? Check out one of our newest videos right here!'
12:49Plus, even more Nicki Swift videos about your favorite celebrity feuds are coming soon.
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