Movies - TV
Darrell Hammond's Sean Connery Impression For SNL Was A Last-Ditch Effort
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
Darrell Hammond played Sean Connery on “Saturday Night Live” in the long-running “Celebrity Jeopardy!” sketches, where celebrities are portrayed as dumb. In a 2020 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hammond said his Connery impersonation was, surprisingly, the most successful thing he’d ever done — but it was conceived in a moment of desperation.
Hammond shared, “It was like a last-ditch effort on a Tuesday night around four o'clock in the morning because I had nothing to turn in or sell to any of the writers. I was always taught that an audience needs to understand your premise and kind of agree with it in order to laugh. [...] So I thought, nobody's going to believe Sean Connery doesn't know things, or [...] he hates Alex Trebek.”
Amazingly, the sketch soared, as Hammond added, “And yet it's one of these instances where the stars were in alignment.” Perhaps the surreality of the premise allowed audiences to accept the sketch's bizarre humor, which produced comedy gold, and Hammond went on to appear in 13 of the 14 “Celebrity Jeopardy!” sketches that aired on “SNL” between 1996 and 2009.