10 Famous Comedians Who Auditioned for 'SNL' But Didn't Make the Cut

Eddie Murphy, Gilda Radner, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, Kristen Wiig — over fifty seasons, the cast of Saturday Night Live has given the world some of comedy's biggest, brightest names. Casting reps for the iconic NBC series famously comb through sketch-comedy venues and improv troupes like the Groundlings, Second City and The Upright Citizens Brigade for fresh talent and bring in those promising players to audition at Studio 8H. However, as seen in SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night — a new four-part docuseries honoring the legacy of the NBC institution, which drops on Peacock on Thursday, Jan. 16 — not every SNL wannabe gets hired, even now-famous comedy superstars.

The first episode of the SNL50 doc, entitled "Five Minutes," is all about the nail-biting experience of auditioning for the show. ("My first audition, I threw up," Andy Samberg revealed in the four-part film.) "It's a very nerve-wracking day, I think a lot of them come in terrified," shared Ayala Cohen, an SNL talent executive and producer from 1995 to 2012. And clearly those nerves fumbled famous auditioners like Stephen Colbert, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart and more who, despite clear comedic talent, were ultimately passed over by the SNL gods. Here are 10 celebs who auditioned for Saturday Night Live but surprisingly didn't make the cut.

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10 Celebs Who Auditioned for SNL and Didn't Get Hired

1. Stephen Colbert

Nowadays he's a late-night legend for talk shows like The Colbert Report and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but three decades ago, Stephen Colbert was just another sketch-comedy performer with dreams of appearing on Saturday Night Live. Alas, the comic wasn't hired when he auditioned to be a cast member in 1992, which he humorously recounted in the SNL50 doc. After watching his tryout, which saw Colbert act as a waiter who is grossed out by the menu specials, Stephen jokingly proclaimed: "I watched that and I went, 'Aw, good for you buddy, it's gonna get better. Eventually someone will like that enough to hire you." And he was right!

2. Jennifer Coolidge

"There's a lot of people that I brought in that I'm like, 'I can't believe we're not hiring that person," says Marci Klein, former head of SNL's talent department, in the new doc. One of those great auditioners was comedy great Jennifer Coolidge, who tried out for the show wearing a big blonde bouffant. "[She] was so funny. I couldn't get anybody to get it," Klein added. Clearly, people eventually got what was so fantastically funny about the performer. Since her SNL rejection, Coolidge has appeared in classic Christopher Guest comedies like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, as well as the Legally Blonde films and the American Pie franchise and took home two Emmys and a Golden Globe for her uproarious performance in HBO's The White Lotus.

3. Kevin Hart

Though he's now one of the most successful stand-up comedians in Hollywood, Kevin Hart has publicly revealed that his audition for Saturday Night Live back in the day was anything but successful. While hosting SNL in March 2013, Hart joked about the failed tryout during his opening monologue, which saw him pulling out impressions of Robert De Niro, Training Day-era Denzel Washington and NBA Coach Avery Johnson in front of showrunner Lorne Michaels. "I quickly found out that white people don't know who Avery Johnson is," Hart joked.

4. Mindy Kaling

Six-time Emmy nominee Mindy Kaling is a comedic powerhouse both on and off camera, starring in beloved sitcoms like The Office and The Mindy Project as well as creating and writing for popular series including Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls. Despite all of that TV success, Kaling sadly didn't succeed in fulfilling her childhood dream of being on Saturday Night Live. After Mindy's audition, Lorne Michaels and co. decided against hiring her as an onscreen talent but did offer her a job as a sketch writer. Kaling turned it down. "It was really a life-changing thing," the star shared on the Daily Beast’s The Last Laugh podcast. "I think the course of my career would have gone really differently had I left The Office and done that instead."

Related: Meet the Cast of 'SNL' Season 50

5. Lisa Kudrow

She's known the world over as one of our favorite Friends, but future Phoebe Buffay performer Lisa Kudrow originally wanted to be known as an SNL star. While performing with The Groundlings in LA in the early '90s, Kudrow was recommended to Lorne Michaels, who later told The Hollywood Reporter that the comedienne's audition was "brilliant." However, the showrunner said that Kudrow wouldn't have fit the cast because "it was at the time when it was Jan Hooks and Nora [Dunn]" and instead chose actress Julia Sweeney over Kudrow. "I was pretty disappointed because I thought, 'Maybe you're one of those people for whom good things don't happen,'" Lisa told Vanity Fair in 2014. Thankfully, that proved to be very untrue.

6. Jordan Peele

In one segment, the SNL50 doc shows a young Jordan Peele auditioning in 2008 as a "too thug" barista named Darius. The comedian reportedly had high hopes of being cast to play then-President Barack Obama on the sketch-comedy series. However, Peele was not hired, and the Obama role was instead assigned to SNL cast member Fred Armisen. But Peele went on to have his own considerable sketch-comedy success with the series Key & Peele and later expanded far beyond the genre as the writer-director of acclaimed Black horror movies like Us, Nope and Get Out, the latter of which earned him an Academy Award for screenwriting.

7. John Goodman

Long before he appeared in beloved Coen Brothers films like The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and starred as family patriarch Dan Conner in the popular ABC sitcoms Roseanne and The Conners, John Goodman was just another guy throwing his hat in the ring at Studio 8H. Goodman reportedly auditioned for SNL back in 1980 but didn't get the part. However, the Emmy winner has certainly made up for it in the decades since, returning to 30 Rock to host Saturday Night Live a whopping 13 times over the years.

Related: 'SNL's 'More Cowbell' Skit Didn't Originally Feature Any Cowbell

8. Kathy Griffin

Lisa Kudrow wasn't the only comedienne passed over for Julia Sweeney by Lorne Michaels — her fellow Groundlings member Kathy Griffin suffered the same fate after her own SNL audition. Kudrow revealed in Vanity Fair that she remembers Kathy crying over the harsh rejection, with Griffin jokingly adding: "We are still not over it. I don't care what Lisa says." But as ever, Griffin bounced back and became one of stand-up comedy's most successful stars, with an Emmy-winning reality show (Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List), Grammy-winning comedy albums and the Guinness World record for the most televised stand-up specials ever by a comic.

9. Donald Glover

Actor-rapper Donald Glover unsuccessfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live not once but twice in the late 2010s. Though no doubt a disappointment at the time, Glover — who later found TV fame as Troy Barnes on the NBC sitcom Community and as the Emmy-winning creator and star of the FX series Atlanta — had said he actually feels grateful that SNL did not hire him. He told GQ in April 2023: “Me being on SNL would’ve killed me. I got friends who made it on SNL and, at the time, I was like, damn. But if I got on SNL, my career wouldn’t have happened.”

10. Jim Carrey

"I wasn’t at the Jim Carrey audition," Lorne Michaels told The Hollywood Reporter of the comic's 1980 Saturday Night Live tryout. "But somebody who was there said, 'I don’t think Lorne would like it,' and they were probably wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Or maybe they were right — who knows? No one gets it all right." And, clearly, passing over a veritable comedy superstar like Jim Carrey — who became one of the genre's biggest names with box-office hits like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, The Truman Show and How the Grinch Stole Christmas — is definitely not getting it right.

Related: 'SNL' Reveals Next Two Hosts and Musical Guests for Season 50