This ‘SNL’ Sketch Got Taran Killam A Job on ‘Star Wars’
As Dana Carvey proves on the regular when he records Fly on the Wall podcasts with David Spade, his Saturday Night Live memory isn’t always razor sharp. But he was able to pull an accurate nugget from the deep recesses of his brain when Taran Killam dropped by for a chat this week. “Did I host the show when you were there, and you did a Harrison Ford at read-through, which kind of impressed me?” Carvey wondered. “I go, ‘Who is this kid?’”
Killam acknowledges he was the kid when Carvey hosted in early 2011, still a featured player and working his way into the regular cast. While there was no Star Wars sketch in Carvey’s episode, Killam proudly said he eventually got his Harrison Ford imitation on the show. “I’m really a big Star Wars nerd.”
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It’s not clear which sketch Killam is referring to, though it’s likely the 2014 episode in which SNL parodied The Force Awakens and its aging original stars. Bobby Moynihan played a nearsighted Princess Leia, pre-disgrace James Franco was a hobbled Luke Skywalker, and Killam delivered a funny Ford impression as a geriatric Han Solo, piloting a Millennium Falcon outfitted with handicapped license plates.
Being on SNL also allowed Killam the chance to meet J.J. Abrams, the new franchise director who cameoed in a sketch about unlikely actors auditioning for his new Star Wars installment. Killam played David Beckham in that one, bending BB-8 like a soccer ball.
Not long after that episode, “J.J. Abrams reached out and he was editing the first new Star Wars,” Killam told Carvey and Spade. “And he said, ‘Hey, will you do me a favor? I need a line of dialogue off-camera from Harrison, and we can’t get him for two months.”
“Oh my God,” murmured Spade, who’s never been asked to get anywhere near a Star Wars film.
“We just want it for the reel so it doesn’t take you out of it,” Abrams explained to Killam. “It’s like a special effects thing. Will you do it?”
Abrams didn’t have to ask Killam twice. The SNL star recorded the dialogue as Harrison Ford, and Abrams “said he used it up to literally the final mix.”
That’s all it took for Killiam, Spade and Carvey to launch into a Harrison Ford-off, trading imitations of the grouchy actor spitting lines from Star Wars and Indiana Jones along with the decidedly less exciting Witness and Working Girl.
But no amount of goofing around at Ford’s expense could diminish Killam’s fan-boy admiration for the original Han Solo. “He's the coolest, man,” Killam said. “He is the movie star.”
