Over the course of eight years in the cast of Saturday Night Live, Beck Bennett performed comedy with more than 150 celebrity hosts. But no one—not even Donald Trump himself—was as difficult to work with as Elon Musk.
In the 300th episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Bennett looks back on his SNL audition, discusses what it was like to join the show with one of his oldest friends Kyle Mooney, and reveals exactly what made Musk a more “offensive” collaborator than Trump. He explains how he knows Vladimir Putin liked his shirtless impression a lot more than Trump liked Alec Baldwin’s portrayal, how he knew it was finally time to leave the show, and how Lorne Michaels nearly talked him into staying.
Finally, Bennett talks about the two very different movies he appears in this summer: voicing a cartoon dog in the raunchy Netflix movie Fixed and joining the DC cinematic universe as The Daily Planet’s Steve Lombard in Superman.
Bennett still remembers how “upset” the SNL cast and crew were the week Trump was brought in to host the show in 2015 after announcing his first presidential run. “The week after we were all exhausted, felt kind of sick, just like, ugh, that was a lot to deal with,” he says.
Unlike other celebrity hosts who walked the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza with agents, managers, and personal assistants, Bennett says Trump spent most of the week by himself. “At the table read, he was having a little bit of trouble reading,” he says, echoing what other cast members have recalled about the current president’s cognitive struggles.
At one point, Trump interrupted the table read to take a call that seemed to be bad news. When he hung up the phone, cast member Leslie Jones tried to break the awkward silence by asking, “How much money did you just make on that phone call?” Everybody laughed but Trump, who said he just found out his book went to number one on the best-sellers list.
“Everybody clapped,” Bennett says. “But, it was like, really? It didn’t sound like you were dealing with the news that your book went to number one, but, OK.”
One thing Bennett learned quickly about Trump that week is that he did not like receiving notes or getting corrected. “He’d be like, ‘No, that’s what I said,’” he explains. “But he was just kind of loafing around. It was just a lot to have him there. But he wasn’t particularly awful beyond that, I don’t think.”
This prompts Bennett to remember an experience from the show that stands out in his mind as far worse. “As far as having billionaire personalities come on the show, Elon Musk was a lot more offensive,” he reveals.
Musk was brought in to host what would end up being Bennett’s third-to-last show as a cast member in the spring of 2021. “That was harder to deal with,” Bennett says. “He had very odd ideas and he was very rude and less predictable to perform with. In a way Trump was a little bit more like, ‘You tell me where to go and what to say, and I’ll tell you if I’m OK with that.’”
Musk, on the other hand, thought he was the funniest person in a room of professional comedians and was not shy about making those feelings known. That included, as Bowen Yang first teased and then Chloe Fineman ultimately confirmed, making members of the cast cry with his harsh criticism.
“You would think that Donald probably would’ve been leading more with that energy, but I think he was just more like, yeah, whatever,” Bennett says with a laugh. “But yeah, it was draining. It was a lot.”
On the flip side, Bennett cites Larry David as the host he “got along” with better than many others. “He was so funny,” he says. “He’s very much Larry David in every interaction, always kind of doing bits with you and having fun and laughing. And he was also at the show a lot playing Bernie, so he was around a lot. There were other hosts that I feel like I had that with, that maybe just hosted once when I was there, but as far as somebody continuing to come back and fit into our humor in a fun way, and just get along with them really well and have a great time, that was Larry.”
After joining the show in 2013 with his sketch comedy partner Kyle Mooney, Bennett initially felt a bit relegated to the weirder corners of the show. The pair, who were hired along with their fellow Good Neighbor group members Dave McCary as a director and Nick Rutherford as a writer, often suffered the indignity of having their off-beat taped sketches “cut for time” after they failed to connect with the dress rehearsal audience.
But with his generically “straight man” good looks and increasingly versatile cache of impressions, Bennett became a more and more central part of the show, clocking the most screentime of any other cast member by his final season. And whether it was playing Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, or, most memorably, a shirtless Vladimir Putin, Bennett often found himself opening the show next to Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump.
“It was so fun and really interesting to see how, when you do one of these political characters, it’s going to reach so much farther than anything else,” Bennett recalls. After he started playing Putin on the show, Lorne Michaels informed him that clips of his performance were playing on Russian State TV. “It’s a little scary, but it meant that Vladimir Putin liked it,” he says, otherwise it wouldn’t see the light of day there. “The impression serves to skewer our president,” he explains, “making fun of Donald Trump for being a puppet. And Putin is the smart, cool guy with his shirt off.”
The Putin character became such a big part of Trump’s storyline on the show that Bennett reprised his impression, albeit very briefly, as part of SNL’s controversial parody of The White Lotus—called “The White Potus”—this past April, long after he had left the cast.
As for why Bennett decided to exit the show after eight seasons in 2021—and he confirms that is was definitely his decision—he says the fact that he and his wife, fellow comedic actor Jessy Hodges, were about to have their first baby, made what could have been a very hard call a lot simpler. But that didn’t mean it was easy to tell Michaels that Season 46 would be his last.
Bennett was dreading having the conversation with Michaels before that season was over, but his friend and cast mate Aidy Bryant convinced him that he would “regret” not being upfront with their powerful boss.
“I think you’re going to appreciate having told him in person,” Bennett remembers Bryant telling him. “She’s a very wise, caring person who will always listen and help you out, so I took her advice and asked for a meeting with Lorne in between dress and air on that last show. And I told him that Jessy was pregnant and we were moving to L.A. to start a family.”
Launching into his Lorne Michaels impression, Bennett says, “He was like, ‘Look, you know, you can’t always be in the house and the family needs to make money…’” Michaels and NBC did present Bennett with a generous offer to stay for the following season, which was “hard to say no to,” but he ultimately decided it was time to “walk away.”
Returning for the show’s big 50th anniversary special this past February made Bennett understand an SNL truism for the first time: “Once you’ve done the show, even if you’re not on it, you’re always an SNL cast member.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
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