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‘I expected that I would’ve been on the stage’
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Published Dec 25, 2025 • Last updated 17 hours ago • 3 minute read
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Chevy Chase arrives at the People’s Choice Awards on Jan. 6, 2010 in Los Angeles. Photo by Frazer Harrison /Getty Images North AmericaArticle content
Chevy Chase is not happy he was excluded from a TV special that celebrated Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary earlier this year.
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Chase, who was one of the original stars of SNL when it debuted on Oct. 11, 1975, didn’t appear on the stage or in any of the sketches during NBC’s SNL50: The Anniversary Special back in February.
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In the forthcoming documentary I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, which premieres on CNN on Jan. 1, Chase says he was miffed that producer Lorne Michaels didn’t include him in the broadcast.
“Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” he says, according to Deadline and PEOPLE. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. 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?”
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Chase, who was the first SNL Weekend Update host during in show’s inaugural season, wondered aloud why he didn’t have a chance to cameo during that segment.
“Why was Bill Murray there and why was I not? I don’t have an answer for that,” he said.
Chase, who was in the audience during the taping, says in the documentary that he brought up how hurt he was in a text to Michaels, “and then took it back.”
“I said, ‘Okay, I take it back, silly.’ But it’s not that silly. Somebody’s made a bad mistake there. I don’t know who it was, but somebody made a mistake. They should’ve had me on that stage. It hurt,” he said.
Chase’s wife, Jayni, says that up until the day of the show, her husband was under the impression that he might appear in “two bits.”
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“They were going back and forth,” she says in the documentary. “And then, all of the sudden, ‘No, there’s no bit.’”
According to PEOPLE, Michaels said “there were a couple versions of (Weekend Update),” but that there were also concerns that Chase “wasn’t as focused.”
SNL alum Martin Short also defended producers from excluding Chase by saying, there were “too many people” to include everyone.
Directed by two-time Primetime Emmy Award winner Marina Zenovich, I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not explores “the complexities and challenges” that have shaped the actor’s legacy.
“I’ve always loved a challenge, and Chevy certainly offered one. I wanted to understand the real person behind the guarded, conflicted man we’ve often seen on camera,” Zenovich says.
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Chase’s controversies
Despite being one of Hollywood’s most well-known comedians who went on to star in a string of box office hits in the ’80s like National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, Fletch, Spies Like Us and Three Amigos, Chase also has a reputation for being an actor who is not easy to get along with.
“Billy Murray and I came to fisticuffs, but we never really ended up hitting each other,” Chase said in a 2010 interview with Esquire. “We tried, but (John) Belushi got in the middle and we both ended up hitting John. And if anybody deserved to be slapped in the forehead, it was John, for instigating it all.”
Chase was fired from NBC’s Community in 2012 by creator Dan Harmon for reportedly using a racial slur on set aimed at co-star Donald Glover.
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“I just saw Chevy as fighting time — a true artist has to be OK with his reign being over. I can’t help him if he’s thrashing in the water,” Glover told the New Yorker of the incident.
In 2018, the Emmy winner took a swipe at SNL in an interview with the Washington Post, saying the late-night program delivered “the worst f***ing humour in the world.”
“I had to watch a little of it, and I just couldn’t f***ing believe it,” Chase said. “How could you dare give that generation worse s*** than they already have in their lives? It just drives me nuts.”
When Jason Reitman made a movie about the frenzied debut episode of SNL back in the fall of 1975, he said that Chase lambasted the finished product.
“Chevy comes in to watch the movie, and he is there with Jayni and they watch the film, and he’s in the group, and he comes up to me after and he pats me on the shoulder and goes, ‘Well, you should be embarrassed,’” Reitman said during an appearance last December on David Spade and Dana Carvey’s Fly on the Wall podcast.
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not airs on Jan. 1 at 8 p.m. on CNN.
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