Darrell Hammond reveals the 'SNL' cast member who could always make him break (original) (raw)

Darrell Hammond normally maintained his cool during sketches on Saturday Night Live, but there is one former cast member who crack his steely demeanor.

"Amy Poehler could make me laugh if I was sitting next to her," he said In an interview on the Amy & T.J. podcast with hosts Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes. "When we did Regis and Kelly, and she's sitting right there next to me, she's gonna do something on there that she didn't do in dress, and it's gonna be brilliant. It's gonna take me by surprise, and I would laugh." (Hammond and Poehler played Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa together six times in the mid-2000s.)

Darrell Hammond as Regis Philbin and Amy Poehler as Kelly Ripa on 'Saturday Night Live'.

Mary Ellen Matthews/NBCUniversal via Getty

Hammond also said that despite rumors suggesting SNL's top boss Lorne Michaels disapproved of on-camera breaking, it never affected him personally "I never got any flack for anything like that," the performer said. "You say that Lorne didn't like it — he never said anything about it because, I mean, the audience loves seeing Amy improv, man. Right? They love seeing that."

The performer, who was part of the show's cast from 1995 to 2009, continued to praise his female costars elsewhere in the interview. At one point, Hammond struggled to come up with a "Mount Rushmore" of favorite SNL performers because of the cast's overwhelming talent.

"The people I saw over there were freaky, man," pointing to Kate McKinnon and Maya Rudolph as examples of exceedingly skilled entertainers. "Maya can do impressions, great impressions. She can act — she's a great actress. She can sing — she's a great singer. And she can dance — I mean, she can really dance. When you look at that — on Broadway, they talk about triple threats — she's the quintuple threat, you know?"

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Darrell Hammond.

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Hammond said that it was difficult to wrap his head around his colleagues' talents. "It would be hard as hell to write down what you're even looking at sometimes," he said. "You know, there are times when I would be out there with Molly Shannon when she would get hot, you know? There was the scene we did where she played the 50-year-old stripper and I was Tony Soprano. We were at Bada Bing. She got her marks where she was gonna be and what the cameras were and managed to be funny during dress. But once she had all that down, she could really let it all out of the gate. And sometimes you sit in there and watch, [and say] 'Well, damn. Damn.'"

Shannon's abilities supercharged Studio 8H. "SNL makes a peculiar sound when everyone laughs at the same time," he said. "You know, it's 275, 300 seats. It sounds like 300 mason jars breaking. I remember watching that sometimes, like, when Molly Shannon's looking up there, seeing the [audience's] heads moving. I mean, that's magic to me. It sounds like magic."

Hammond's 14 seasons on SNL make him the second-longest tenured cast member in the show's history, behind Kenan Thompson's 21 years. Hammond returned to SNL in 2014 as the announcer for the introduction, replacing Don Pardo after his death.

Listen to the full conversation between Hammond, Robach, and Holmes above.