Reese Witherspoon recently opened up about hosting the episode of Saturday Night Live! (SNL) right after the events of 9/11. She recalled how pressurizing it was for her back when she was only 25 and how she eventually managed to take on the responsibility.
Reese Witherspoon talks about hosting SNL immediately after the September 11 attacks
While Reese Witherspoon has been around in the industry for decades, and she was around for quite a while even back in 2001, it was still a big responsibility to host the famous show after the events of 9/11 that left the nation stunned.
“I would give that zero stars. Do not recommend,” Witherspoon joked during her appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert Podcast. “I was coming off Legally Blonde. I wasn’t supposed to be the season opener,” she recalled. Instead, she was slated to be on the second episode.
She continued, “The first episode, they canceled it because of 9/11, obviously. Then, Lorne Michaels called me and he said, ‘I really need you to show up. I really, really need this. Rudy Giuliani is going to be here. All the firefighters are going to be here. Paul Simon is going to sing, I just need you to come out and do something a little light and tell America that we got to laugh again. We’ve got to get back the national spirit.’”
To add to this pressure, Witherspoon was a new mother and had one of her biggest movies coming that summer, taking the stakes even higher.
The end result was good, no doubt. “We did it, and it was good,” she recalled, but the pressure was still a lot to handle, and she said she “completely left my body…. It’s not the show’s fault. It was just too much responsibility for a 24-year-old girl.”
It remained one of the memorable episodes of SNL and quite a milestone in Reese Witherspoon’s life.
