If you get cast on Saturday Night Live, you’re well on your way to a successful comedy career. But first, you have to survive your SNL audition, which is one of the toughest in show business.
For starters, it’s an incredibly selective process. The show has had only 153 official cast members since it debuted in 1975. Staffers review hundreds of candidates every year, from all around the country, before narrowing it down to just a handful of potential hires. So, your odds of making it through that screening to become one of the “Not Ready for Primetime Players” are about as good as your odds of becoming an astronaut. Then, the stakes are high. Although getting cast on SNL isn’t a guarantee that you’ll become a multi-millionaire, the show has made its cast members famous from the very beginning – everyone from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg has gone on to become superstars. Finally, once you get the call to audition at 30 Rockefeller Center, it’s one of the toughest rooms – mainly because your potential boss, SNL creator Lorne Michaels, notoriously doesn’t like to laugh.
With so much pressure and such high stakes, it’s no surprise that many SNL cast members (and some famous folks who didn’t make the cut) have great stories about their auditions. Here are some SNL audition stories that range from hilarious to terrifying.
1. Eddie Murphy Did His Audition Monologue On-Air When An Episode Was Running Short And Got Promoted To Full-Time Cast Member
Eddie Murphy was one of the youngest cast members ever, being hired at the age of just 19 in 1980. But it took persistence to get there. Murphy had auditioned and been rejected earlier that year. But he was so determined that he called talent coordinator Neil Levy every day to ask for another chance, pointing out that he needed the job to feed his 18 siblings. Eventually, Levy agreed to let Murphy be a background extra.
The night Murphy appeared as an extra, the show was running five minutes short. Needing to fill out the running time, Levy suggested they allow Murphy to perform the monologue he’d used months earlier in his audition. With no other choice, Michaels allowed it. Murphy did so well that he was promoted to full cast member two weeks later.
Murphy would never have a chance to audition again because, as he revealed on Live with Kelly and Ryan, his SNL audition was also the first and only audition of his entire career – meaning SNL helped him become so famous that he never needed to audition again. It’s understandable why many consider him to be one of the best SNL cast members of all time.
2. Bill Hader And Andy Samberg Inadvertently Psyched Each Other Out
Many future SNL cast members first met each other during their auditions. Bill Hader and Andy Samberg’s first meeting was memorable for how awkward it was. The two first bumped into each other on an elevator at 30 Rockefeller Center, where Hader saw that Samberg was carrying a backpack full of props, which Hader found intimidating. “I went, ‘Oh my god, that guy is so prepared, I have nothing, I have no props,'” he said. Meanwhile, Samberg found Hader’s lack of props equally intimidating. “He was looking at me going, ‘Oh, that guy has no props. He doesn’t need props,'” Hader said.
Things were still awkward when Hader and Samberg wound up on the same plane after their auditions. Hader had already found out that he’d been cast, but Samberg hadn’t been told the news. Hader spent the entire flight pretending he was in the dark.
3. Jimmy Fallon Took Pictures Of The Carpets And Did An Impression Of Adam Sandler
Like many SNL cast members from the ’90s and beyond, Jimmy Fallon grew up watching the show and always wanted to be on it. While Fallon was taking classes at the Groundlings comedy theater in Los Angeles, his manager kept sending in tapes to SNL‘s former head of talent development Ayala Cohen, and he finally got an audition.
When Fallon first set foot inside 30 Rockefeller Center after years of seeing it on TV, the experience was surreal and he wanted to document every last little detail of it. With his disposable camera – it was the 90’s, after all – he took a picture of the carpet inside the elevator, because it had the NBC peacock on it. During his audition, Fallon trotted out a series of celebrity impressions including Jerry Seinfeld, Gilbert Gottfried, Bill Cosby, and former SNL cast member Adam Sandler – a bold choice.
Fallon didn’t hear anything for three weeks, until Michaels invited him for a meeting in Los Angeles. At the meeting, Fallon’s fate rested on one question: Was he willing to wear wigs? Fallon wisely answered, “Yes.”
4. The Audition Coordinator Told Molly Shannon, ‘Whatever You Do, Please Don’t Do That Mary Katherine Gallagher Character’
Molly Shannon moved to Los Angeles after graduating from NYU’s drama school to pursue comedy. She had previously auditioned for SNL and never heard back, so she kept honing her craft and her characters until she got another opportunity. When that opportunity arrived, the audition coordinator told her not to use one of her strongest characters. “Whatever you do, please don’t do that Mary Katherine Gallagher character. You’ll never get hired. Lorne won’t like that, he’ll think it’s disgusting and dirty,” the coordinator apparently said. Shannon ended up heeding the advice and didn’t do the character, but the rest of her audition went so well that she didn’t even mind being mugged in Tribeca later that night.
Luckily for us, once Shannon got the job, she did manage to convince Michaels to give the armpit-smelling Catholic schoolgirl a shot. The character would end up being one of Shannon’s most popular.
5. Will Ferrell Planned To Fake-Bribe Lorne Michaels, But Lost His Nerve
When it comes to comedy auditions, it can be tempting to try something unconventional in order to stand out. But this is also risky, because there’s a chance your gimmick will backfire. For his audition, Will Ferrell thought it would be hilarious to pretend to bribe Michaels.
“I [had come] in with a briefcase full of counterfeit money that I’d bought at a toy store,” Ferrell told The New York Times. “And in the middle of whatever Lorne was going to say, I was going to start stacking the equivalent of $25,000 on his desk. ‘Listen, Lorne, you and I can say whatever we want to say. But we really know what talks, and that’s money. I’m going to walk out of this room, and you can either take this money or not. And I can be on the show.'”
But when Ferrell actually got into the meeting with Michaels, he was too intimidated to try the joke and backed down.
Ferrell’s audition experience was also harrowing because his prepared material was too similar to what Michaels had already seen other performers do, forcing Ferrell to stay up all night coming up with a new audition. During his audition, Ferrell played a businessman who liked playing with cat toys when he was alone. It was met with total silence, but as we all know, Ferrell got the gig anyway.
6. Lorne Told Horatio Sanz He Could Tell His Parents He Had To Move To New York, But ‘Don’t Tell Them You’ll Be On The Show’
Horatio Sanz grew up watching the show. When he got the call to audition while working as a company member at the Second City in Chicago, Sanz prepared for SNL more than he had for any other audition in his life. He arrived in New York a week early to acclimate and practice his material, and during his audition, he managed to get actual laughs.
But even though Sanz felt good about his chances, Michaels’s cryptic way of doing business meant Sanz was never quite sure he got the show until he was actually on it. When he met Michaels after his audition, Michaels said, “You did good. We liked you, we’d like to have you, I think we’d like to have you on the show,” but stopped short of actually confirming the news. Michaels even told Sanz to move to New York, but when Sanz asked if that meant he could tell his parents the news, Michaels said no. He told Sanz, “Tell them you have to move to New York, but don’t tell them you’ll be on the show.”
As Sanz now knows, even getting cast on SNL isn’t a guarantee that you’ll stick around for a full season, and this was Michaels’s way of letting candidates know.
7. Cheri Oteri Was Up All Night With Food Poisoning The Day Before Her Audition
For Cheri Oteri, the circumstances going into her SNL audition were about as far from ideal as possible. The night before, she went to an Italian restaurant and developed food poisoning. She spent all night vomiting and never slept, and when she arrived the next morning, all the blood vessels in her face were broken. It was so bad that she apparently looked like she’d been in a car accident, and her appearance shocked the makeup person.
But when it came time to perform, Oteri’s adrenaline was pumping so much that the night before didn’t matter. She even managed to coax a laugh out of Michaels. “I saw him out of the corner of my eye, laughing his very subtle, subtle laughter. Almost regal laughter,” she later recalled.
8. Victoria Jackson Auditioned For ‘SNL’ On ‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson’
SNL is known for hiring comedians of all stripes, and not just sketch comedy specialists. Victoria Jackson got the chance to audition in 1986 after producers saw her standup comedy routine in which she stood on her head and recited poetry. Making her audition even more challenging, she was given just one day to prepare. She’d just given birth three months earlier. And finally, when Jackson flew to New York, the airline lost the ukulele that was central to her routine.
Jackson showed up for the audition wearing a French maid outfit she often wore during standup. Lorne Michaels liked her performance, but was hesitant to hire her because she didn’t do celebrity impressions, and she didn’t get the job. But soon after, she saw an opportunity to change Michaels’s mind. She had been scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and asked Carson’s producers if she could try out some new impressions as a sort of extended audition. They agreed, so long as she didn’t name the show she was auditioning for. She spent two weeks practicing impersonations like Edith Bunker, Teri Garr, and Tina Turner, and performed them on the show. It worked, and Michaels gave her the job.
9. Aubrey Plaza Tried To Pin The Tail On The Celebrity
Before her breakout role on Parks and Rec, Aubrey Plaza got her start on SNL – just not in the way you’d think. In 2004, Plaza earned an internship with the show’s design department. Unfortunately, the role didn’t really allow her to interact with the cast. However, as she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, she “studied like a sponge.”
Plaza did eventually get an opportunity to audition for the show, performing a pair of characters that sound as delightfully weird as you’d expect from the deadpan aficionado. One was a Puerto Rican news reporter who attempted to make the news sexy, even when the stories were anything but. As she describes her second comedic offering:
“The other one was a pill-popping housewife that had my own talk show called ‘Celebri-tails,’ where I would just name celebrities and what kind of tail they would have… if they had a tail. Like I would say, ‘Lindsay Lohan would have, like, a bushy squirrel’s tail. Bill Clinton would have, like, a polar bear’s nub.’ Anyway, I didn’t get the part.”