Joan Cusack's One Season Of Saturday Night Live Was Absolutely Miserable

Although Joan Cusack has gone on to have an undeniably impressive career as a comedic actress, her start at "Saturday Night Live" wasn't particularly promising. She lasted a single season before they fired her along with several other members of the cast. "It wasn't working," she said in a 2000 interview with Terry Gross. "And it wasn't working for me too. I was miserable. [Laughs] I think I wound up in the hospital, actually. I had, like, some surgery, and it's, like, horrible."

Besides a joke about it being stress-related, Cusack has never clarified what exactly she was in the hospital for, but it's not too surprising to hear. With the show's notoriously competitive and reportedly toxic behind-the-scenes environment, not to mention the sheer stress of having to prepare a 90-minute variety show episode within a single week, it's a miracle that cast members don't end up in the hospital more often. 

Cusack was just twenty-three at the time, fresh out of college, and recalled feeling frustrated that her big break was not as fulfilling as it seemed it'd be. "I felt so badly about it that I didn't make it on that show, and it wasn't right for me ..." she explained. "You know, I loved Gilda Radner, how could it have not worked out?" But although Cusack credits her own failure to get with the program on "SNL," it's hard not to feel like this was just a case of her joining the show at the worst possible time. Season 11 of "SNL," which aired from the fall of 1985 to spring of 1986, was widely considered a disaster.

Season 11 also featured Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall, two actors who've also gone on to have fulfilling life-long careers, but even they were not spared from getting the axe at the end of the season. "It was an unhappy time during that period for a lot of the actors and actresses involved," said Terry Sweeney, another one-season cast member working alongside them, and Cusack concurs. "I don't think anyone watched [the show] that year at all," she said. "They were going to cancel the show, actually, that year, and Lorne Michaels at the last minute decided to come back. And I think maybe they had two months to kind of get everything together ... No one got a chance to get to know each other that much beforehand." 

Writer Al Franken referred to Cusack as a "bright spot" in the season, but lamented that "nothing else went right." And although nobody thinks Robert Downey, Jr. is talentless today, the lack of cohesion on the set led to Rolling Stone eventually placing him dead last on the ranking of every single SNL cast member, right behind the Muppets. The whole eleventh season was such a mess that, after most of the cast was fired, the next season opened with Madonna giving an apology. "NBC has asked me to read the following statement, concerning last year's entire season," she said, pulling out a piece of paper and reading from it: "It was all a dream, a horrible, horrible dream."

As has been proven again and again over the years, however, flunking out of "SNL" doesn't have to be the end. Cusack soon had her breakout role with the 1987 film "Broadcast News," and it was all uphill from there. "I'm so grateful that I was on [Saturday Night Live]," Cusack clarified in her interview with Terry Gross. "You just have a little bit more confidence to do things, even if it didn't go well." 

Much like Sarah Silverman or Julia Louis-Dreyfuss after her, Cusack's gone on to be so successful in her own right that most people don't even remember she was on "SNL" at all. People today know her best from her role as the stressed-out principal in "School of Rock" or the kind, slightly creepy neighbor in "Shameless," not from her briefly recurring "SNL" character Salena. Public perception of season 11 still hasn't improved much in these past few decades, but for Cusak, Downey, Jr., and Hall at least, the miserable experience served as a clear-cut stepping stone to better days ahead.