Lorne Michaels Banned '90s 'SNL' Star From the Show for ‘Weeks at a Time'

Lorne Michaels changed the lives of hundreds of people. He has produced plenty of TV shows that helped people get their big break, but no break has been bigger than becoming a Saturday Night Live cast member. SNL has the power to catapult people into stardom. It doesn’t always happen, but even if someone makes the main cast for a couple of years, they have a better shot at continuing their career. Michaels is incubating new talent and can often become a father figure to folks.

The longtime producer’s intimidation factor plays into his relationship with cast members, old, new, and never was. Marc Maron famously spent years trying to interview Lorne after feeling he screwed up his SNL audition during the ’90s. His shadow looms large, but he is still a human being. Being a father figure goes both ways. Lorne has become attached to members of his cast over the years. Few have left an impact on Michaels like John Belushi did.

Belushi was part of the original cast and tragically died of an overdose in 1982 at the age of 33. His death made Lorne change regulations at the show, something Susan Morrison, author of The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, recently shared on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “When Belushi died, it really hit him hard,” she told Shepard. “And I think he felt like, oh my God, this whole approach of just letting people do their own thing on their own time, this was the wrong approach. We’re a tribe, we’re a group, and we have to look out for each other.” This new way of doing things would be applied years later to a new star: Chris Farley.

Farley would, unfortunately, meet a tragic end similar to Belushi’s. It was something Lorne was trying to avoid from the very beginning. “So by the time Chris Farley comes along, you know, 10 years later or whatever, from the beginning he clearly had addiction issues,” Morrison explained. She noted that Lorne would “call him into his office and give him these talks about the drinking or the drugs.” Former SNL writer Bob Odenkirk told Morrison that Farley “would be excited to be called into” Lorne’s office, despite getting in trouble.

That’s the kind of relationship Lorne has with many of his former employees. With Farley, Lorne didn’t want to see another tragedy, so he was hard on him. “It was like the kind of thrill of being in the principal’s office, but at the same time, you’re getting in trouble,” Morrison told Dax. “He couldn’t metabolize it, but Lorne had really changed his approach. He would ban Farley from the show for weeks at a time if he was too f***ed up. And he sent him to a series of really tough love rehab places. And obviously, it didn’t do it for him.”

Farley died in 1997, also at the age of 33, two years after he had been fired from SNL.