Lorne Michaels Once Named This Action Star The 'Biggest Jerk' In SNL History

"Saturday Night Live" has been going on for 50 seasons now, so they've had their fair share of bad hosts. Sometimes the host is simply not that comfortable with live acting – looking at you, January Jones or Jacob Elordi – and sometimes the host has the bad luck of getting a cold at the worst possible moment, like what seemingly happened to poor Jean Smart in the season 50 premiere. Other times the host is bad because, well, they're just kind of a bad person.

Case in point: Steven Seagal, who hosted in April 1991 and helped deliver an episode so terrible that it got him banned from the show forever. Over three decades later, most "SNL" fans are happy to just pretend the episode never happened, because ite was a trainwreck in a way that wasn't even that fun or interesting. His episode was painful, awkward, offensive, and it's only gotten worse with age. 

In fact, Seagal's episode was so bad that he became one of the few hosts to be openly badmouthed by the showrunner himself, Lorne Michaels. In a September 1992 episode, that week's host, Nicolas Cage, had a line in his monologue where he wondered if he was "the biggest jerk who's ever been on the show." Michaels replied, "No, no. That would be Steven Seagal." 

Besides this moment, the closest we've ever gotten to the show badmouthing a recent host on air was Elon Musk in 2021, where that season's finale with Anya Taylor-Joy included a mild dig at his Courtroom Wario sketch. For the most part, the cast stays respectful enough to only badmouth them in an interview years after if happened, like with Bill Hader and Jay Pharoah for Justin Bieber. And even then, Hader gave Bieber some benefit of the doubt, speculating that he might've just been "in a bad place" during that period. For Seagal to be insulted so brazenly on the live show itself, by the head showrunner no less, must've meant he'd done a uniquely terrible job. So, what happened?

Steven Seagal was one of the biggest movie stars of the '80s, to the point where he was once considered for the role of Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton's "Batman." The only problem? He was never actually that good at acting. He started off as a martial arts teacher with zero acting experience, but he lucked out when one of the guys in his class turned out to be Michael Ovitz, one of the most influential agents in Hollywood at the time. Seagal soon became a household name, despite being a limited actor and famously difficult to work with.

"The key to making a good Seagal movie is to put very little pressure on Seagal himself to carry the film, and instead surround him with far more exciting actors," said film critic Patrick Willems, in a recent video essay, where he argued that director Andrew Davis (of "Under Siege" fame) best understood how to use the actor. "Who cares if Steven Seagal is a black hole of charisma when half the movie is Gary Busey killing people dressed in drag while Tommy Lee Jones gives an early version of his Two-Face performance?"

But while most of Seagal's flaws as an actor could be glossed over in a film through editing, multiple takes, and shifting the focus to the more charismatic actors involved, this is a lot harder to do on a live show, where Seagal's status as host meant that the whole 90-minute show needs to be at least somewhat focused on him. As the recent film "Saturday Night" has made clear, the show's format allows no do-overs once 11:30 p.m. hits. 

But although Seagal's terrible live acting skills certainly made the episode an uphill battle for the writers and other performers, the real nail in the coffin was Seagal's behavior behind the scenes.

The way the schedule at "SNL" goes is that everyone makes meets up Monday morning for a free-form pitch meeting. Cast members and writers will often pitch ideas to the host, and the host's invited to pitch their own ideas in return. This is step one in the long, chaotic process that goes behind every "SNL" episode, and Seagal was already blowing it.

"When we pitched some of our ideas for Seagal at our Monday meeting, he gave us some of his own sketch ideas," cast member Julia Sweeney would later recall. "And some of his sketch ideas were so heinous, so hilariously awful, it was like we were on 'Candid Camera.' ... He had this idea that he's a therapist, and he wanted Victoria Jackson to be his patient who'd just been raped. And the therapist says, 'You're going to have to come to me twice a week for like three years,' because, he said, 'That's how therapists f***ing are. They're just trying to get your money.' And then he says the psychiatrist tries to have sex with her."

Former "SNL" writer Al Franken would also recall this pitch in a 2022 interview. He recalled responding to Seagal's pitch by saying, "So, you want us to do the ugliest sketch that's ever been on television?" In the same interview, Franken made sure to emphasize that Seagal was "just the most awful person... He's a f***ing moron," and that he "lapped every bad host" Franken had worked with over 15 seasons on the show.

In addition to a way-too-dark sense of humor, Seagal was notoriously unwilling to joke about himself. Former cast member David Spade explained in a 2020 interview, "A lot of people think we're there to make fun of them. But if we're getting you on the show to host, we all want it to work. And if you make fun of yourself — this is where it gets tricky — if you make fun of yourself, it will benefit you. And if you don't, and if you fight it so much — that was [Seagal]. He was too cool and had his image."

Former "SNL" writer Bob Odenkirk confirmed this in a 2022 Howard Stern interview, describing how they pitched Seagal to star in the show's recurring "Hans and Franz" sketch, an Arnold Schwarzenegger-inspired parody of an exercise show. Odenkirk recalled Seagal saying, "'If I do this sketch, if I do it, I have to beat them up.'" 

In another cast member interview bashing Seagal, Dana Carvey also described how Seagal had gotten upset after the first rehearsal of "Hans and Franz," where the characters joked that Seagal couldn't beat Schwarzenegger in a fight. Carvey explained, "So, I went up to him and I said, 'Steven, are you okay?' And he didn't look at me. He was looking straight forward and he goes, quote, 'I just wish Arnold was here so I could kick his f***ing ass.'"

Seagal got so worked up that they had to rewrite the sketch so that there wouldn't be any ambiguity (from Seagal's perspective, at least) that he was still a big tough guy who could win a fight with anyone. "He didn't want to go along with what the plan was that week, and as a result, I think that was the first week that I heard talk about replacing the host and just doing a cast show," David Spade later said. The network ultimately decided that cutting him midweek wouldn't be worth the trouble, but in hindsight it probably was.

"He just wasn't funny and he was very critical of the cast and the writing staff," Tim Meadows would say about Seagal. "He didn't realize that you can't tell somebody they're stupid on Wednesday and expect them to continue writing for you on Saturday." 

Sure enough, because Seagal had such bad taste in picking the sketches pitched to him, and because he'd been so miserable to work with, the writers didn't really want to work extra hard on his behalf anyway. The episode ended up being perhaps the most painfully awkward installment of the show's 50-year history. Sketches from the episode are notoriously hard to find online these days (I guess Peacock/NBC is still embarrassed), but if you do find them, you'll notice long stretches of audience silence. 

Such is the case with "Jennifer's Date," one of the few sketches from the episode to survive on YouTube, and one that completely squanders Chris Farley's comedic talent. The premise is that Farley's character is picking up his date Jennifer, only to be stuck dealing with her intimidating father played by Seagal. The joke was supposed to be that Seagal's character switches voices whenever his wife's not in the room with him, going from goofy and friendly to deadly serious during the many times the other characters left the room. But Seagal allegedly felt that the goofy voice was beneath him, so he chose to stay serious the entire sketch, undermining its whole schtick.

Another famous clunker was the episode's closing sketch, in which Seagal invites his non-actor friends on stage to beat up some Exxon execs. "That's what you get when you pollute the planet," he says to the camera at the end, followed by a Looney Tunes-style "The End" tag. Odenkirk described his disbelief about the sketch to Howard Stern, saying, "It's insane... As a viewer you're like, 'who are these actors? They're not in the cast.' ... and then [Seagal] enters the banquet room and starts beating them up and throwing them around the room. It goes on for like eight minutes, it's the longest scene you've ever seen... The audience is mystified."

Those quiet laugh-free pauses are made particularly painful when you remember that "SNL" has a sensitive mic for audience laughter, to the point where TV viewers often don't even realize a segment is bombing with the live audience unless the performers themselves acknowledge it. (Such was the case with Shane Gillis' monologue when he recently hosted — the laughter sounds mostly normal on TV, but apparently it was so light in-studio that Gillis felt the need to acknowledge he was bombing multiple times.) The fact that the audience was so quiet in all of Seagal's sketches is pretty damning, made even more so by how Seagal himself never seemed to notice. 

If there's one takeaway from all the interviews about Seagal over the years, it's that Seagal thought he was the coolest guy who ever lived. That might be why he never seemed to understand why he was bombing on stage that night, and why, when Lorne Michaels later bashed him during Nicholas Cage's monologue, he didn't understand where the animosity came from. 

Al Franken explained, in the same interview where he called Seagal the worst host ever, how Seagal had confronted him a few weeks after Cage's episode. "Seagal leans over to me and goes like, 'Why did Lorne say that about me, that I was the worst host ever?'" Franken hesitated, before replying, "It's, you know, because you're such a big star. He had to pick a big star... And also you're like a tough guy, you can beat anybody up, so that's the joke... He picked you because you're such a big star and you could, you know, kick his ass."

According to Franken, Seagal responded to this explanation by saying, "Oh..." and nodding sagely. That's right: Franken's transparently evasive flattery was somehow enough to assuage Seagal's concerns. In the 30 years that have passed, has Seagal ever realized that people hated his "SNL" performance? As far as we can tell, he still thinks he nailed it.