Will Ferrell recalls messing up his very first “SNL” line: 'I flub it!'

Will Ferrell doesn't think highly of his first Saturday Night Live appearance.

The Anchorman star reflected on his 1995 debut on the sketch comedy show during an interview with Travis and Jason Kelce's New Heights podcast. "One of my 'Welcome to Hollywood' moments was getting to be the first member of a brand-new cast on Saturday Night Live, and I got to say the first lines of our opening show," Ferrell recalled. "And I'm sitting there, and they're counting down the show, and I'm looking out. My folks are in the audience, friends and family, and I'm like, 'I can't believe I'm here and I'm about to say whatever line.'"

Ferrell doesn't think he performed his debut moment correctly, though. "A little trivia here: I mess up my line the first time I speak on camera on the show. I flub it," he remembered.

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However, it's not immediately clear if Ferrell's memory is entirely accurate. In the version of Ferrell's debut episode (the season 21 premiere, hosted by Mariel Hemingway) that's available on Peacock, the Step Brothers star delivers the opening line of the "OJ Today" cold open flawlessly: "The defense rebuts the rebuttal, next on 'OJ Today.'"

Ferrell does briefly stumble over a line in "Get Off the Shed," the sketch that followed Hemingway's monologue, which marked his first full live sketch on the show. After successfully saying, "Hey there, how ya doing?", Ferrell slips up with his second line: "I don't know we've bee— that we've met before."

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It's possible that Ferrell conflated the two sketches in his recollection on New Heights — or that the archived version of the episode replaced a bigger blunder in the cold open with dress rehearsal footage, leaving the footage of Ferrell's mistake lost to time.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ferrell explained why the mysterious line flub happened. "You know how you do the first dress rehearsal, and by the time you do the live show, you're like, 'Piece of cake. I got it.'?" he asked. "I did the dress rehearsal, and I was like 'This is gonna be great.' But I'm sitting there in the chair, and the enormity of the moment hits me, and I start to get a little bit emotional thinking about, 'Wow, this is the thing I've always dreamed about,' and then it was like, 'Five seconds!'"

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The pressure of the moment led Ferrell to spurt out total gibberish in his telling — and his flub was so bad that SNL boss Lorne Michaels paid him a visit backstage. I was like, 'Argh!' and Lorne came back, and he was like, 'Are you okay?'" he remembered. "I'm like, 'I'm fine, I'm fine. I dunno what happened.'"

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Ferrell now thinks of the incident as a valuable learning opportunity. "It was incredibly uplifting and incredibly grounding all at the same time," he said. "It was like, don't take anything for granted. I can't believe I'm here."

Listen to Ferrell's full appearance on New Heights above.

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