SNL used to be in the movie business. After Wayne’s World became one of the biggest hits of 1992, the sketch show spent the next decade making decidedly less successful films. There were ones about the Coneheads, the ambiguously androgynous Pat, Stuart Smalley, the Roxbury guys, Mary Katherine Gallagher, et al. The last one was MacGruber, which bombed hard but has since become a cult classic. Maybe if it had made bank we would have gotten one for another beloved character, which sounds…amazing?
In an interview with Las Culturistas (as caught by Deadline), Seth Meyers revealed that at some point there was talk of doing a movie about Bill Hader and John Mulaney’s Stefon, the “city correspondent” who would grace Weekend Update with absurd stories of NYC’s nightlife. Meyers was not going to be one of the stars, he said, “because I knew it was going to be Stefon and James Franco or whoever.”
But Meyers knew who it would open: Stefon, after wrapping up one of his segments, would ask Meyers to join him for a night out on the town.
“And I’m like, ‘All right, one night,’” Meyers recalled. “And then you would do these super-fast cuts of he and I at all these crazy clubs. That would be the opening montage, and then it would end with me in a body bag, and Stefon would say, ‘He’s dead!’ Then the splash: Stefon: The Movie.”
Um, can they still make this? Hader has really stretched his legs in his post-SNL life, especially with Barry, which went to some truly jaw-dropping places. Surely he could do a film where Stefon offers viewers a tour of the seedy underbelly of the Big Apple.
Alas, it’s probably not to be. Earlier this year Hader told The New Yorker that he’s just not interested in a Stefon movie. He spoke about the uncertainty he felt after leaving SNL.
“It’s this weird combination of being open, but also clearly knowing what you don’t want. Like, nah, I don’t want to do a Stefon movie,” he said. “It didn’t work as a sketch! That’s why it was on ‘Weekend Update.’ And the reason people liked it is because I kept laughing.”
But don’t fret: You can always watch supercuts of Stefon’s many fine SNL appearances, starting here:
(Via Las Culturistas and Deadline)
