John Goodman bombed his SNL audition, but thought he'd get hired anyway

We speak, of course, of the infamous “Jean Doumanian” season of Saturday Night Live, the run from 1980 to 1981 that took place after Lorne Michaels, most of his writers, and his entire existing cast all exited the series together. There are a lot of fascinating “what might have been”s from that period—Eddie Murphy basically had to beg his way into a spot on the series, while Doumanian’s team passed over Paul Reubens, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bernhard, and future Oscar-winner Mercedes Ruehl. And Goodman, who was, at the time, a recent college graduate who’d only worked in TV commercials and off-Broadway plays. A confident one, though: In the actor’s account, “I didn’t put a lot of thought into it, unfortunately. I didn’t have any improv or stand-up background, and I had a terrible audition. But for some reason, I still thought I’d get cast.” (Ah, youth.)

But while Goodman getting the job would have produced at least one weird historical trivia point—he might have ended up overlapping on the series for a single episode with future Roseanne co-star Laurie Metcalf, who holds the record for shortest tenure as a “featured player” on the series—it doesn’t seem to have hurt his career too much. Elsewhere in the (very fun, very John Goodman-ish) interview, he notes that he doesn’t worry about not winning awards—”We all can’t be best plumber every year”—talks about the hip injury he suffered while working with Tom Cruise earlier this year, and notes, incredibly charmingly, that there was only one Gemstones situation he really pushed back on, apparently being uncomfortable with a scene in the show’s final season that “involved the soixante-neuf [French for ’69’] position with my girlfriend. I said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ [But]they set the sexual position up in a way that it was just funny. I was only uncomfortable for an hour or so, and I’m no good naked.”