Saturday Night Live alum Chris Parnell said he “never really knew” why he was fired from the late-night sketch show and later rehired.
“I never really knew, I’ve never known why it happened exactly,” he recently said on The Patrick LabyorSheaux podcast while promoting the upcoming Season 8 debut of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty. “I don’t know. It was a big shocker. Every summer it would happen that — we were supposed to find out, I think like at the end of June whether our contract had been renewed for the following season, and it was never at the end of June, so we would usually hear from our agents, like, ‘Oh, Lorne hasn’t decided yet, so can you just wait for a few more weeks?’”
At the time, the comedian and actor recalled that he was in touch with fellow castmates like Rachel Dratch and that there was “no reason” to believe anyone would be exiting the series.
“And then I got a call from my manager, saying, ‘Buddy, I don’t know what to tell you, they’re not gonna bring you back,’” Parnell, who joined in 1998 and was let go in 2001, explained. “I was like, ‘Whoa.’ It was a pretty big hit, and you immediately realize how much of your own sense of self-worth is wrapped up in this idea of being a Saturday Night Live cast member.”
However, “thankfully, I had a few people go to bat for me,” Parnell remembered, including Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan, who reportedly went to discuss the matter with Michaels. A then-writer at the show, T. Sean Shannon, even penned a “scathing” sketch to demonstrate cast ire about the decision: In an obvious dig at Michaels and other head producers, Parnell was characterized as an “amazing chef” at Benihana who had gotten fired to the confusion of the rest of the staff, which the Anchorman star said was performed at a table read “to crickets.”
He added, “At one point, I heard it was an NBC executive that I sort of knew, who didn’t like me. But I also heard it was budget cuts. I never got a straight answer, and I didn’t dig too hard to try to find out what it was ’cause I don’t know that I really wanted to know.” (Parnell was let go at the same time as Abbott Elementary‘s Jerry Minor, while Molly Shannon departed of her volition.)
Shortly after his firing, he was told the door was “not completely shut” to rejoin the show but he was kept in “limbo” for a while; it wasn’t until he had moved back to Los Angeles that he was rehired, missing 12 episodes of a 20-episode season that would have been his fourth with SNL.
“I was very happy to go back. I was thrilled to go back,” he said, though adding that the firing process “definitely set me back some.” He soon got “confidence boosters” through participation in various sketches and while taking over Ferrell’s spot as the George W. Bush impersonator for a season “and also just the degree to which everybody welcomed me back and the degree to which everybody was, I think, genuinely surprised that I’d gotten let go, so that was all very comforting and supportive.”
Characterizing Michaels as “a distant father,” Parnell also said he “always got along with him — even after I got fired and re-hired, he brought me into his office and said, ‘I made a mistake, what can I say?’ Which is, I think, rare for Lorne.”
Though Jim Belushi was also fired and later rehired, Parnell does hold the sole distinction of being fired twice. This time, he was joined by Dratch and Horatio Sanz, who also departed in 2006 due to budget cuts.
“Technically, I was fired again, I was let go again. I was ready at that point, and I was OK, and I knew that might be coming,” he said.
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