Kenan Thompson.Photo:Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC
Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC
Though he is now the longest-running cast member onSaturday Night Live,Kenan Thompson’s early blunders on the show nearly pushed him to quit altogether.
“I was excited for the first opportunity to showcase my chops on the big stage,” he recalls in the book. “Thing was, I couldn’t make it through dress rehearsal. I stuttered over this one line and couldn’t ad-lib my way out of it.”
Kenan Thompson.Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Though the 20-yearSNLveteran would be able to recover from the mistake now, Thompson says he “spiraled into a full-on panic” as a rookie and even heard an “involuntary ‘Oh no!'” slip from “someone’s mouth.”
“If a slip up like that happened at Nickelodeon or in the movies I’d done, we could just do another take,” he continues. “AtSNLthere was a lot riding on the live performance, obviously, and to no one’s surprise, the sketch didn’t make it to air.”
Thompson felt like he let Shannon down, though the writer understood having been through failed sketches plenty of times. But from then on, theKenan & Kelalum says that “he and every other writer avoided me like COVID” and Thompson began to think he’d never “get a character of my own.”
Kenan Thompson on ‘Saturday Night Live’.
He adds, “I had no idea if I was doing a good job or not. When the season finished, I didn’t even think I’d be asked back. I knew I needed to get better at writing my own characters, and prayed I’d get another season to take a stab at it.”
The actor frequently got “donut’ed" — industry jargon that meant “having zero airtime during a show” — and “almost quit” because of them.
“I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I was famous enough that people were trying to follow me off the subway, but I couldn’t get on the show,” he writes, sharing that he took the cuts personally and often wondered “if there was space atSNLfor my kind of comedy.”
“It led to many depressive feelings,” he says, until he mustered up the courage to approachMaya Rudolphto ask why he was chosen. “‘It was a no-brainer,’ she said. ‘We could tell you were ready and you’re adorable. We all said, ‘Obviously, it’s Kenan,'”
“To hear that the things I was doing resonated with people was heavy, man. That had a huge impact on me and was a turning point,” he writes.
Kenan Thompson and Keke Palmer on ‘Saturday Night Live’.Saturday Night Live
Going forward, Thompson learned how to better support other players’ wins and “celebrate the show outside of myself.”
He continues, “After being promoted to team player, I was in a cold open for the very first time screaming, ‘LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!’ And let me tell you, that never gets old. It’s exciting every single time.”
Thompson joinedSNLin 2003 and holds the record for the longest-tenured cast member in the show’s history. He has been nominated five times at theEmmy Awardsfor his work onSNL, and took home a statue in 2018 for co-writing the sketch “Come Back, Barack.”
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source: people.com
