17 "Saturday Night Live" Cast Members Who Hated Working With Their Castmates Or Crew

The Saturday Night Live working environment is notoriously intense — long, late hours, competition for airtime, and the immense intimidation of millions of eyes on you. I imagine it would feel like working in a pressure cooker, where every little disagreement with or dislike for someone reaches a boiling point.

Here are 17 SNL cast members who hated working with other members of the cast and crew.

Cast member vs. cast member feuds:

1. John Belushi and Chevy Chase's rivalry reportedly dated back to their early radio days at National Lampoon: Lemmings. According to the book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, on his first day at SNL, John went into Chevy's office, pointed at a picture of his girlfriend on the desk, and said, "'Oh, you have one of those, too? You've got the regular one. I've got the one with the donkey dick.'"

On their radio show, John was the star, but on SNL, Chevy stole the spotlight. In the book, producer Dick Ebersol said, "John is radically pissed off, because he sees Chevy running away with the show. Now it's going to be all about Chevy. Onstage, John had to be the star, not Chevy."

2. Tracy Morgan told Penthouse magazine that Jimmy Fallon irritated him and the rest of the cast with "laughing and all that dumb [bleep] he used to do." He added, "He wouldn't mess with me because I didn't [bleep]ing play that shit. That's taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, 'Oh, look at me, I'm the cute one.' I told him not to do that shit in my sketches, so he never did."

Then, while recording the audiobook version, he went off-script, elaborating, "They never going to host Saturday Night Live. And I don't mean — that's not even me, but that's what happened to me over there. They never treated me well. There were people that treated me beautifully, like Will Ferrell and Colin Quinn and Molly Shannon — I love them. But Cheri Oteri and Chris Kattan — I never cared for them either. Fuck 'em."

4. In Live from New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Jan Hooks expressed her distaste for castmate Victoria Jackson, who's now an outspoken conservative and has made several anti-gay and anti-Muslim comments. Jan said, "Victoria Jackson? I thought she had a pretty good gig. I just have a particular repulsion to grown women who talk like little girls. It's like, 'You're a grown woman! Use your lower register!' And she's a born-again Christian. I don't know. She was like from Mars to me. I never really got her."

5. Victoria Jackson told Live from New York, "Nora [Dunn] told us the first day I was there that she had a close relationship with Lorne [Michaels, the executive producer]. I'm not spreading gossip, since she actually told everyone herself — probably to intimidate us. I don't respect people who do that. I just went, 'Oooh.' We had this meeting, and one of the producers asked us what was wrong with the show. And everyone was supposed to say something, but no one was saying anything. And it was all of us sitting on the floor like high school or kindergarten or whatever. And finally I go, 'O.K., I'll say it in one sentence. You really want to know?' So then I was shaking, and I stood up and told everyone that what was wrong with the show was those two women — I pointed to Nora and Jan — and all the things they did bad."

6. Nora Dunn told Salon that, when Victoria Jackson presented each cast member with a Bible audiobook for Christmas, "It didn't surprise me... I don't understand anyone who plays a character in real life unless they're having an intellectual discussion, which I never had with Victoria. When I met her, I was surprised that there was not much difference between what she did in front of the camera and what happened off camera. For me, it tried my patience."

In a separate interview, Nora told Salon, "I am not interested in what Victoria Jackson has to say. She has said Obama is a Muslim who has imposed Sharia Law on us — crazy stuff like that... I felt for Victoria because I don't think she fit in on SNL. And I couldn't work with her because we weren't on the same page — ever. We weren't even in the same book. We happened to be on the same show."

8. David Spade had tension with Rob Schneider. He told Watch What Happens Live, "We sort of had a little friction. We got hired together; we were best buddies. But some things happened. I think he didn't put my name on a sketch the first time, [and] he didn't tell me about a writers' meeting. So I thought he was trying to get me fired, which was very easy at that point."

9. During production of the Wayne's World sequel, rumors of a feud between Mike Myers and Dana Carvey circulated. Insiders alleged to Entertainment Weekly that Mike "barely included" Dana's character in his initial script and that they disagreed over Mike's desire to direct the movie. However, reps from Paramount and both actors' management denied this.

Animosity brewed between the castmates when Mike allegedly copied Dana's Lorne Michaels impression for his Dr. Evil character in Austin Powers. Dana told The Howard Stern Show, "I did do it spastically. When I first got on SNL, no one I knew was doing him, and I first saw him on Wednesday night picking the show. It would get kinda tense, and they put the cards on the board. And my first hook into Lorne — 'cause usually it's one phrase — was Lorne saying, 'Um, I still have no fucking first act.' Now, he would bite his nails. I just [put my pinkie to my mouth]. Then, when I saw Mike do it, I did kinda go, 'Hmmm,' but, you know, it's a long time ago. Look, it's a really funny affectation because it's so specific."

10. Nora Dunn had a contentious working relationship with castmate Jon Lovitz. She told Salon, "I think we were a dysfunctional family. He and I had a love/hate relationship. I found it very hard to work with Jon because I came from theater when I first started, and you don't fuck with somebody before they go on. You actually take your rehearsal seriously. Jon was the guy banging on the piano while you're trying to rehearse. He was like that disruptive brother that you say, 'Please just get out of here!' When John Malkovich did the show, he obviously comes out of theater, and he and I were trying to rehearse an 'Attitudes' sketch, which he had written with me, and Lovitz was banging on the piano, and Malkovich asked me, 'Is that what goes on here?'"

"So I would get very irritated with Jon, and we'd have arguments. But I loved him, and I realized that going back to the reunion. I've always found Jon Lovitz very funny. His humor is this kind of crazy throwback, the way he uses his body, it's like he's a puppet, you pull the strings and his arms go flying... He's like a vaudevillian comedian," she said.

Cast member vs. crew member feuds:

12. Garrett Morris, who was the show's first Black cast member, told the Guardian, "I will say to the end of my days: Lorne's writers had a lot of racism going on. Lorne himself? Zero racism. Because, remember, when I was hired, I was the only Black writer. Lorne wanted to have somebody Black on TV at nighttime. People didn't want that. They were clamoring to make it all white. He didn't."

Garrett also had to push back against efforts to box him into stereotypical characters. He said, "It really threw me when we were going through the first show. I didn't have a skit, but I was watching another one. I said to Lorne, 'There's a doctor in this skit. Why don't I play the doctor?' And he says, 'Garrett, people might be thrown by a Black doctor.' Now, mind you, I had come from New Orleans, where you're surrounded by Black medical doctors and Black PhDs. In all big cities down south, for that matter."

13. On Touré Show, Leslie Jones called the director who shot her digital shorts about being in a relationship with Kyle Mooney "a fucking asshole." She added, "And I don't give a fuck if you see this... You still are probably a fucking dickhead. A fucking narcissistic dickhead. He's just, like, one of the white boys who thought that he's doing fucking Shakespeare. No, this is a fucking sketch, and you're not funny, and you're not creating nothing beautiful. You're just being an asshole with this tedious fuck shit."

She added, "Me and Tiffany [Haddish, who hosted in 2017] almost fucked him up one night." She said that the shoot was running late because the director was making everyone wait for Lorne Michaels to arrive and film his part. Having already cut her hand on her wedding dress costume, Leslie decided to leave, which allegedly upset the director. She said, "This motherfucker was like, 'What makes you so fucking special?' And I was like, 'Who the fuck you talking to?' 'You, I'm talking to you. What makes you so fucking special? Lorne is this, this, and this.' And I said, 'Motherfucker, I know you're not fucking talking to me. What makes me special is that the fucking sketch is about me and Kyle, not you. So what the fuck?'"

14. John Belushi allegedly wouldn't do sketches penned by the show's women writers, including Lorne's wife at the time, Rosie Shuster. In Live from New York, Lorne Michaels said, "He didn't do pieces that Anne [Beatts] or Rosie [Shuster] wrote. So somebody would have to say that a guy had written it or something. Yet he was very attached to Gilda [Radner] and very attached to Laraine [Newman]."

On The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jane Curtin said, "Their battles were constant. [The women writers] were working against John, who said women are just fundamentally not funny. So you'd go to a table read, and if a woman writer had written a piece for John, he would not read it in his full voice. He felt as though it was his duty to sabotage pieces written by women."

Additionally, he told IGN that SNL was "just not a real pleasant place to work" and described the work environment as "living hell." He said, "The way it was organized... The way people were treated... The approach to the material... [by] management."

Larry David himself added, "One Saturday night, five minutes before air, after getting probably six or seven sketches cut from the show, I went up to Dick right before we were going to go on and I said, 'That's it. I'm done. I've had it. I quit. It's over.' And I walked out and started walking home, and it was freezing out, and I was in the middle of walking home, going, 'Oh my God, what did I just do? I just cost myself, like, $60,000!' I'm adding up the money from the reruns and all this. At that time, I needed every penny I could get my hands on. So, yes, I went back the next week and pretended I hadn't quit — which I also used later in a Seinfeld episode."