For better or worse, he’s Chevy Chase, and you’re not, and part of being Chevy Chase is rubbing people the wrong way. Chase’s behavior has made him many enemies over the years, and despite the many, many chances people have given him, when it comes time to get the band back together, he might not get the call. Hence, when Lorne Michaels reunited his Not Ready For Primetime Players for SNL 50 earlier this year, Chase was curiously absent. Unsurprisingly and understandably, Chase took it personally, “kind of.”
Per LateNighter, in an upcoming CNN documentary, I’m Chevy Chase, And You’re Not, Chase explains that he was “kind of upset” about being left off the show, despite being asked to do a couple of bits. “I expected that I would have been on that stage too, with all the other actors,” he says. “When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?” His wife, Jayni Chase, says that there were discussions about Chase performing “two bits,” and “they were going back and forth,” but then “all of a sudden, there was no bit.”
According to Michaels, it was nothing personal. “There were a couple of versions of [Weekend Update], and we went back and forth on that,” Michaels said, explaining why he went with Bill Murray ranking the Weekend Update hosts instead of Chase doing whatever Chase was going to do. Of course, it wasn’t just that they wanted to go a different way. Michaels got a hot tip “that Chevy, you know, wasn’t as focused” from “somebody that I don’t want to name.” It must’ve hurt for Chase to see himself ranked fourth by a SNL star whom he’s infamously come to blows with in the past. “Weekend Update simply would not exist without him,” Murray said. “So it would be wrong to have him listed anywhere but number four.” For the record, Murray followed in the great SNL tradition of rewarding family members by giving Brian Doyle-Murray the top spot.
Nevertheless, Chase did confront Michaels, who has held immense power over his ex-employees for more than 50 years. “I did bring it up once in a text to Lorne, and then took it back. I said, ‘OK, I take it back. It’s silly,'” Chase says. “But it’s not that silly. Somebody made a bad mistake there. I don’t know who it was, but somebody made a mistake. They should have had me on that stage. It hurt.”
