In this week’s episode of Rob Lowe’s podcast Literally!, the host had on Vanessa Bayer, the actress who left as the longest-running female cast member ever on Saturday Night Live (she has since been surpassed by Kate McKinnon). In the episode, Bayer talked to Lowe at length about her love of Tommy Boy, and she briefly talked about the pilot she’s shooting for Showtime loosely that’s based on her own life as a childhood survivor of leukemia.
Mostly, however, Bayer and Lowe shared stories about Saturday Night Live. Lowe endeavored to get Bayer to admit to her favorite and least favorite hosts, but she wouldn’t dish, saying that there’s something of an unofficial rule about not disclosing the worst hosts, while there were too many great hosts to list. She also said that she knows from experience that the cast is probably very frustrated with all the celebrity cameos on the series over the last few years because they know how good the cast could be at playing those characters, and they hate losing those opportunities.
One of the more fascinating SNL topics, however, was Rob Lowe’s obsession with how people are arranged on the stage during the sign-off. Bayer had her own thoughts on that.
“There was an episode,” Bayer said, “where I can’t remember the host’s name, but he had gotten in trouble for some domestic abuse or something, and none of us were really thrilled about him hosting. None of the women wanted to be near him for goodnights, so if you watch the goodnights with him, it looks like it’s an all-male show. Women are just all around the periphery of the stage.”
While Bayer did not specify who the host was, it’s not too hard to figure it out, although it wasn’t a host but a musical guest. Watching the sign-off for the February 12, 2011 episode matches that exact description. There was barely a woman in the frame, and they all stayed well clear of the musical guest.
Bayer did say, however, that the goodnights are a big deal for the cast. “Especially in my first season, the bigger the host, I just wanted to go up there and hug them. Because it’s also the part that your friends and family are so excited about. If you get to hug someone cool during goodnights, that’s all anyone cares about.”
Rob Lowe then shared that, on two of the three occasions in which he hosted, he had someone crash his goodnight. Once it was Chevy Chase, who just happened to be bumming around the stage that night and decided to come out for the goodbyes. That’s not the one, however, that has been annoying Rob Lowe for the last 20 years.
“It was Brendan Fraser,” Lowe explained. “And I was going ‘Goodnight. Thank you! I want to thank everybody!’ and in the background, he’s yelling, ‘BEDAZZLED! BEDAZZLED! BEDAZZLED!'”
“Do you know why?” Bayer asked.
“He had a movie called Bedazzled that was opening that weekend, but I have spent many years trying to figure out what was going on with Brendan that night. And the nearest I can come to is that he was somehow promised a walk-on during the show and the show ran long, and he was like, ‘F*ck it! I’m going to go up and yell Bedazzled behind Rob Lowe’s head. BEDAZZLED.”
Bayer, for her part, didn’t have anything to add to Lowe’s experience, but she did wisely single out Fraser’s brilliant performance in the Pauly Shore movie, Encino Man. She is not wrong.
Source: Literally! with Rob Lowe
