Since Saturday Night Live has been a television staple since its 1975 debut, the show has featured far too many cast members to list them all here. Of course, there have been some SNL cast members who’ve stuck around for years, including Kenan Thompson, Darrell Hammond, Kate McKinnon, and Maya Rudolph. On the other end of the spectrum, some SNL stars came and went so quickly that a lot of people forget they ever joined the series’ cast.
When most people think of Saturday Night Live, it is the show’s best actors and skits that come to mind first. However, the show has certainly had its fair share of lowlights including a few cast members whose tenures were complete failures. The truly amazing thing is that according to Rolling Stone, the worst cast member in SNL history currently is a massive movie star even though he was fired from the show after one season.
Rolling Stone’s Ranking
In 2015, Rolling Stone published an article in which they ranked all of the actors who’d starred in Saturday Night Live up until that point. According to Rolling Stone’s exhaustive ranking, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd were Saturday Night Live’s five best cast members in that order. From there, Bill Murray, Phil Hartman, Amy Poehler, Gilda Radner, and Chevy Chase were included to round out the top ten.
Of course, when Rolling Stone ranked every Saturday Night Live cast member, some performers were going to be listed as the show’s lowlights. Amazingly enough, Some of the performers who found themselves near the bottom of the list had very memorable tenures. For example, Jim Breuer, Victoria Jackson, Gilbert Gottfried, Colin Quinn, and Norm Macdonald were all ranked among the show’s ten worst cast members in history. However, the SNL cast member who Rolling Stone named the single worst in the show’s history had a very forgettable run.
Coming In Last
Even though Saturday Night Live is the reason why Lorne Michaels is rich and famous, he made the surprise decision to walk away from the show for several seasons during the early-‘80s. Upon his return in 1985, Michaels decided to recast the show and he hired Robert Downey Jr. as a part of that effort. Unfortunately for all involved, Downey Jr.’s SNL tenure came to a quick and unceremonious end. On the bright side for Downey Jr., most people have forgotten that he ever was a part of SNL’s cast or they never were aware of that fact in the first place.
When Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield sat down to rank every Saturday Night Live cast member, he clearly didn’t forget Robert Downey Jr. as he included him in the last place. In his write-up, Sheffield started by calling him “a comic genius” before citing that as part of the reason why Robert Downey Jr. is the worst SNL cast member of all time.
“Making him unfunny stands as SNL’s most towering achievement in terms of sucking. How do you f**k up a sure thing like Downey? He’s funny in anything. I mean, dude was funny in Weird Science. He was funny in Johnny Be Good. He was funny in Iron Man. But he met his Kryptonite, and it was SNL, where he spent the 1985-1986 season sucking up a storm. His greatest hit? A fart-noise debate with Anthony Michael Hall. In a perverse way, the Downey Fail sums up everything that makes SNL great. There are no sure things. No rules. No do-overs. No safety net — when you flop on SNL, you flop big. And that’s the way it should be.”
Robert’s Perspective
In the years since Robert Downey Jr. left Saturday Night Live behind, he has become a Hollywood megastar. Best known for headlining the highest-grossing film franchise in history, Downey Jr.’s massive success has resulted in him taking part in a slew of interviews over the years. During a 2019 interview for The Off Camera Show, Downey Jr. spoke about his Saturday Night Live tenure and what he learned about himself
“I learned so much in that year about what I wasn’t. I was not somebody who was going to come up with a catchphrase. I was not somebody who going to do impressions. I was somebody who was very ill-suited for rapid-fire sketch comedy. I was not of that ilk of the Groundlings or any, I’ve never been part of any improv group so I was like wow, this seems really hard and like a lot of work.”
On the bright side, during the aforementioned interview, Downey Jr. made it clear that he enjoyed his Saturday Night Live experience. “I would still say to this day that there is not a more exciting ninety minutes that you can have whether you are any good or not, it is just amazing.” “I was like, this is just a blast.” From there, Downey Jr. briefly addressed being named the SNL worst cast member by calling that “a lie”.