How Bad Will Lorne Michaels Look in the Sinéad O’Connor Biopic?

This week, we learned that the Irish production company ie: entertainment is currently working on a biopic about the life and career of the iconic singer/songwriter and activist Sinéad O’Connor. Perhaps Lorne Michaels could play the Pope.

On Saturday, October 3, 1992, Saturday Night Live’s musical guest made the single most powerful and controversial political statement in the show’s now-50-year history. After singing a somber, a capella cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor closed her SNL appearance by holding a photograph of Pope John Paul II up to the camera before tearing it to shreds, telling the live audience at Studio 8H and at home across the country to “fight the real enemy.” 

O’Connor made this statement on SNL in order to draw attention to the systematic sexual and physical abuse of children within the Catholic Church, a topic that wasn’t nearly as widely discussed at the time as it would be a decade later, following the famous bombshell report on the issue by The Boston Globe.

Undoubtedly, ie: entertainment’s movie about O’Connor will recreate her powerful statement on SNL and depict the massive blowback she suffered in the months after the performance and her own experience with the abuses of the Catholic Church. Modern SNL fans might now wonder whether the makers of the O’Connor biopic will include the 5-foot-7 Canadian elephant in the room during those pivotal scenes, considering how Michaels contributed to the backlash O’Connor suffered for years following the demonstration.

Maybe the director will have Robert De Niro come out and say that he would have beaten the shit out of Michaels if he were there when SNL banned O’Connor and had the next week’s host drag her name through the mud.

Immediately following the broadcast of O’Connor’s SNL appearance, Michaels banned the singer from the show for life (though he would later claim that he’s never banned a musical act). On the very next episode of SNL following O’Connor’s unplanned political statement, Michaels invited Joe Pesci to host the show and deliver a monologue defending the Catholic Church, even holding up the very photo O’Connor tore apart to show that “he” had taped it back together in reverence for the Pope. Pesci expressed his desire to physically abuse O’Connor for her statement on systematic abuse, claiming that, if he were present for the protest, he would have “grabbed her by the eyebrows” and “would have gave her such a smack.”

The following February, after SNL had properly washed its hands of O’Connor’s brave political activism and returned to its toothless, status-quo-worshipping topical comedy, Michaels further condemned O’Connor’s actions in an interview with Spin, saying, “I thought (it) was sort of the wrong place for it, I thought her behavior was inappropriate,” explaining, “Because it was difficult to do two comedy sketches after it, and also it was dishonest because she didn’t tell us she was going to do it.”

Michaels said he was appalled by O’Connor’s unplanned demonstration “the way you would be shocked at a houseguest pissing on a flower arrangement in the dining room.”

However, decades after the damage was done to O’Connor’s career and personal life and the crimes of the Catholic Church became more commonly discussed, as he always does, Michaels followed the cultural shift of opinion on O’Connor’s SNL demonstration and claimed to be inspired by the actions that he so vehemently denounced back when his thoughts on them actually mattered. 

In the 2015 update of the SNL history book Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests, Michaels opined of O’Connor’s since-redeemed SNL appearance, “I think it was the bravest possible thing she could do. She’d been a nun. To her, the church symbolized everything that was bad about growing up in Ireland the way she grew up in Ireland, and so she was making a strong political statement.”

Now that the worlds of entertainment and politics better understand and appreciate what, exactly, O’Connor was fighting for when she derailed Michaels’ sketch show with actual artistic activism, it’s up to ie: entertainment and their creatives to decide how they will portray the SNL brass who were caught unaware by O’Connor’s iconic protest and spent years distancing themselves from it. 

Despite Michaels’ many attempts to white-wash SNL’s history, I don’t think he’ll be able to get the kid from The Fabelmans to make him look like a hero this time.