Billie Eilish is now a few days removed from her first time hosting Saturday Night Live and she ended up doing a terrific job. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t nervous before hand, though. In fact, Eilish told Howard Stern yesterday that she “cried every single day of the week” leading up to the show.
She said:
“The week of preparing for SNL is f*cking nuts, dude. It’s literally alien. I cried every single day of the week, no joke at all. […] I did actually love to act when I was a kid, but that’s not my world, so I don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing. I feel like I am terrible, I feel like I suck. The craziest part of the week was on Wednesday, the table read, where everybody reads 60 — I think, maybe 50, 40… a lot — of scripts at a table. […] You do it for like a few hours, however long it takes, and then there’s a 20-minute break in the middle, and then you do the rest. So you do like 20 scripts and then stop for a second and then 20 more, and in the break, I cried and came back. I went to the Green Room, cried, and came back. I was just scared. I just was like, it’s SNL, these amazingly talented actors surrounding a table where, somehow, I’m the main course for this show I didn’t feel qualified for.”
Eilish then spoke about some… biological responses she had to her nerves, saying, “I had a full-body reaction to being anxious about this the whole week. Threw up on a plane coming here, had crazy sh*ts when I got here like you would not believe… you know, the ones where you have to get fully naked on the toilet. […] I’ve had stomachaches all week, I’ve been anxious and nervous, just ’cause it’s not my world and I’m so petrified of people thinking I suck.”
She noted, though, that once she did a dress rehearsal with an audience, her nerves subsided, saying, “As soon as I saw the crowd and felt their joy, it was like I wasn’t nervous. It was relieving, somehow, and I think that that is just my love for performing, and then I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually really incredible, and I don’t have to worry. This is just for fun.'”
Watch the interview clip above.
