Dana Carvey says SNL asked him to play Biden before he dropped out of race: ‘Maybe you’ll appear as a ghost’..See More 👎

“Lorne [Michaels] was like a dog with a bone,” Carvey recalled. “He just wanted me to come out anyway.”

Guess what? And by the way, the fact of the matter is: Saturday Night Live asked former cast member Dana Carvey to play Joe Biden before the president dropped out of the 2024 race in July.

The Master of Disguise actor, who played Biden in the cold open of SNL’s season 50 premiere last week, explained how he returned to the show that made him a comedy icon in a new episode of his Fly on the Wall podcast.

“Lorne Michaels, our superstar boss, asked me in early June, ‘Would you consider coming out and doing Biden, you know, six shows, and then you can tell us to f— off?'” Carvey recalled.

The offer sounded tempting. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice and tidy,'” Carvey said, accepting the proposal. “And then there was that — let’s just call it eccentric debate with Trump, and then that other thing happened with Biden,” he added, referring to the president dropping out of the race on July 21.

That only enhanced Michaels’ enthusiasm. “Lorne was like a dog with a bone,” Carvey said. “He’s still like, ‘You’ll come out. Maybe you’ll appear as a ghost or something.’ He just wanted me to come out anyway. So then I came out.”

Carvey went on to explain how his experience cultivating a Biden impression on his podcast helped inform the performance he gave on SNL. “I had this take on Biden that I developed on this show,” he said. “I wanted to just meet with the [SNL] writers, and so they said fine. So I went in on Tuesday for about a half-hour and just ran them through the Biden hooks, the Biden walk, ‘Can’t believe it’s not butter,’ all this stuff.”

The comedian wasn’t sure if the writing staff would consider his ideas for the impression. “They’re really nice, and I didn’t know what their take would be on it,” he said. However, the next day, he was thrilled to discover that the writers “pretty much put all” of Carvey’s concepts into the script. “We collaborated the rest of the week, and they were just cool. They let me really do the Biden I wanted to do.”

Carvey also noted that one of the most memorable lines from his Biden debut wasn’t in the initial plan for the sketch. “We didn’t really include it in the script because I don’t know if I even told them the thing that became a catchphrase: ‘And guess what? And by the way, the fact of the matter is,'” he explained. “So I ad-libbed it at read-through. I just threw it in a couple times because it was in flow, and I got a big laugh there.”

Carvey’s apparent improvisation surprised some of his less-seasoned collaborators. “The current cast members, they’re all adorable people,” he said. “They’re young and everything. They’re like, ‘I didn’t know you could ad-lib at read-through!'”

Carvey also said he considered throwing more unexpected pop culture references into his rambles as Biden. “I said, you know, ‘Rich pay their fair share — Sharon Stone, Stone Temple Pilots, Emma Stone, Fred Flintstone,” he said. “And then I had him go, ‘Yabba dabba dabba doo!'”