SNL Behind the Scenes: 12 Wild Stories From the Nearly 50 Years of Saturday Night Live

Money Doesn’t Talk

When Will Ferrell was called in for a meeting with Lorne Michaels after a successful audition, he decided he’d try to seal the deal with a comic bit in Michaels’ office. He arrived at the meeting with “a briefcase full of counterfeit money that I’d bought at a toy store,” Ferrell told The New York Times.

“And in the middle of whatever Lorne was going to say, I was going to start stacking the equivalent of $25,000 on his desk: ‘Listen, Lorne, you and I can say whatever we want to say. But we really know what talks, and that’s money. I’m going to walk out of this room, and you can either take this money or not. And I can be on the show.’”

But Ferrell never found a moment to make the joke, he said, because “it was just not a joking atmosphere. It was just tense. And I never get to do my gag.”

He did get hired, though.

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