Conan O’Brien reveals Tom Hanks‘ amusing manner of recharging before one of his numerous Saturday Night Live hosting performances.
Hanks spoke on a recent episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, a podcast hosted by the comedian and former SNL writer. O’Brien hailed the Here star, who has been as a guest host on NBC’s long-running sketch comedy show ten times since 1985.
“He would arrive up, energised and ready to go, like, ‘Hey!’ Hello, everybody. “What do you have?” O’Brien stated.
“Most hosts stay around a little bit. They sense the misery and despair, smell the odours, and then go. Then they come back reinvigorated for the read-through,” O’Brien said of the week-long writing process that precedes each episode of SNL.
“I came out, and there’s this giant [table] in the conference room, and you were sitting there, and you had been working on your own idea,” Hanks was told by O’Brien. “They had shoved all the tables together, and you were lying on the tables like Christ, with some pages over your eyes, because you were trying to catch a couple of winks before you woke up and got back to writing at three in the morning.”
“I’d always heard that that was the great power of the hang,” Hanks was saying. “You arrived, and you’ll be gone all night Monday and Tuesday. Now they kind of move the host around, but I wanted to go in there and spice things up.”
Hanks’ willingness to “mix it up” with the SNL writers, not to mention his amazing power-napping technique, has reaped dividends. Not only has he returned to the show several times throughout the years, but his “David S. Pumpkin” Halloween routine is one of the show’s highlights.
At the same time, Hanks stated that he has learnt not to be overly pushy about putting his own thoughts on broadcast.
“You say, ‘Hey, I have some ideas for some sketches,’ and every writer says, ‘Well, that’s fantastic. You have ideas that will deny us the opportunity to have our ideas read. “How wonderful,” he told O’Brien.
His takeaway? “You’re the host,” Hanks announced. “Focus on the monologue, then move away. But it’s an excellent hang.”
