“Saturday Night Live” fans may have noticed a major face missing from the “SNL50” anniversary special earlier this year, as original cast member Chevy Chase did not return for the celebration. Chase himself is now asking why that is.
“It was kind of upsetting, actually,” Chase says in his upcoming CNN Films documentary “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.” “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
In the doc, directed by Marina Zenovich and premiering Jan. 1 on CNN, Chase talks about his exclusion from the 50th anniversary special of “SNL,” a show he joined as one of its founding cast members. As one of the few Not Ready for Prime Time Players still alive, Chase expected he would get the same invite extended to former co-stars like Morris and Newman.
Even more confusing to the actor, who became the first anchor of the now-iconic Weekend Update segment, was the inclusion of future anchor Bill Murray in a special Weekend Update segment (Chase and Murray famously got into a fist fight backstage when the former first hosted “SNL”).
“Why was Bill Murray there and why was I not?” Chase asks in the documentary. “I don’t have an answer for that.”
The comedian has developed something of a reputation over the years for being a rather difficult actor to work with. The comedian was written off of “Community” after having vocal disagreements over his character with show creator Dan Harmon. For years, reports and rumors have swirled that Chase was, at least for a time, banned from “SNL” (though show creator Lorne Michaels himself disputed this in a 2018 Washington Post profile of Chase).
“I did bring it up once in a text to Lorne and then took it back,” Chase says in the documentary. “I said, ‘OK, I take it back, silly.’ But it’s not that silly. Somebody’s made a bad mistake there. I don’t know who it was, but somebody made a mistake. They should’ve had me on that stage. It hurt.”
Though Chase did attend “SNL50,” the actor’s wife, Jayni Chase, adds in the documentary that Chevy was initially set to appear in the show itself. In fact, she says that those involved “told Chevy up until that day that there were two bits, they were going back and forth … and then, all of the sudden, ‘No, there’s no bit.’”
Michaels appears to confirm this detail himself in the documentary, implying that Chase was initially set to appear in a potential “Weekend Update” segment — returning to the desk he launched 50 years later. “There were a couple versions of [‘Weekend Update’] and we went back and forth on that,” Michaels says. “There was also a caution from somebody that I don’t want to name that Chevy, you know, wasn’t as focused.”
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