Before Their New Movie, Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell Met on the Post-9/11 Episode of Saturday Night Live

When Reese Witherspoon got the call about starring in a new romantic comedy, she only needed to hear two words: Will Ferrell. “I was like, ‘I’m in,’” she said during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. It had been more than 20 years since their last professional collaboration; for Witherspoon, the opportunity to reunite felt like a “bucket list” moment.

Witherspoon and Ferrell star as warring love interests in Prime Video’s You’re Cordially Invited, a comedy of errors from writer-director Nicholas Stoller about two weddings booked on the same weekend. But they first met when Witherspoon hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live back in 2001. “She was a big deal, and we were like lowly Saturday Night Live cast members,” Ferrell told Entertainment Tonight of his first impression of Witherspoon. “That’s not true,”the Oscar winner replied. “He was a big superstar. And I had just done Legally Blonde, so I’d had my only hit movie ever.”

Adding to the pressure of her hosting debut? Witherspoon’s episode aired on Saturday, Sept. 29, 2001—a mere 18 days after a deadly terrorist attack on the United States. “I was scared out of my mind, it was right after 9/11,” Witherspoon recently told BuzzFeed UK.

“There were lots of people saying, ‘I don’t think you can go on,’” series creator Lorne Michaels told Rolling Stone in 2021, on the episode’s 20th anniversary. “We’ve faced that many times before, but you just have to find a way to do it. I knew it was very, very important that we show up.”

Some celebrities balked at the idea of hosting a sketch comedy series so soon after tragedy, but Witherspoon was up for the challenge. “Reese just had her baby, and she got on the plane, and she came in and she was fearless,” Michaels recalled. “She was great and was like, ‘Whatever you need.’ I’ve always admired her enormously for that time.”

SNL’s first post-9/11 show began on a somber, patriotic note. Then-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani made a speech alongside local firefighters and police officers before Paul Simon performed an emotional rendition of “The Boxer,” though that cold open is not included in the version of the episode currently streaming on Peacock. Some may perceive the opening to be “mawkish or uncritical or not very ballsy,” former SNL writer Harper Steele told Rolling Stone, but she can defend it: “There’s just no way to go back in time and give people a feeling of what the world was like at that moment.”

The rest of the episode was far more lighthearted. There was an installment of Celebrity Jeopardy featuring Ferrell’s Alex Trebek, and a sketch involving Witherspoon as an Ariel-esque mermaid who tries to seduce Ferrell as a lovestruck sailor. During her SNL monologue, Michaels instructed Witherspoon to tell a lengthy joke involving a polar bear’s testicles. “You’re gonna tell a joke and you’re gonna say a bad word,” she recently recalled him saying. “It’s important.”

Michaels previously told Rolling Stone, “The joke about the polar bear was given to me by Randy Newman, and I laughed. I thought, ‘Maybe we can do that.’”

But some, like then-SNL writer Hugh Fink, thought it was a mistake to not acknowledge 9/11 in the monologue. “If she had done that joke any other show, any other season, as a viewer you’d go, ‘Oh, Reese Witherspoon. She’s likable. She’s not a comedian. We give her slack since she’s a pretty, talented actress telling a joke,’” he explained. “But at the time, it seemed like a bit of a disconnect. Not only was she not addressing 9/11, but, we’re going in the opposite direction. We’re not saying terrorism. We’re having a host that’s telling an old joke.”

Still, Fink commended Witherspoon for stepping up to host during a time of turmoil. “There was a nervous energy since this was the first show back. People were very intrigued [about] what we were going to do. People were still scared,” he said. “But Reese had a very calm, nice demeanor that made people think, ‘She’s here. She’s up for this.’”