Adrien Brody doesn't think he was banned from Saturday Night Live

There is a list of celebrity guests rumored to have been banned from Saturday Night Live, few of which have actually been confirmed by anyone from SNL. One of those rumored bans is Adrien Brody, who made a real ass of himself in 2003 by doing an uncomfortable Jamaican impression (complete with dreadlocks wig) to introduce musical guest Sean Paul. In legend and rumor, the story has become that Brody went off-script for this moment, surprising Lorne Michaels and the SNL crew with his terrible Patois. But as is so often the case, the legend doesn’t quite match up to reality. 

The truth is, Brody pitched that bit from the beginning, and—obviously—the SNL costume department provided him with the wig to do his ill-advised thing. “I think Lorne wasn’t happy with me embellishing a bit, but they allowed me to,” he says in a new profile for Vulture. “I thought that was a safe space to do that, weirdly.”

In complete fairness to Brody, it’s understandable that he thought a bit of improvisation (a bad bit of improv, but improv nonetheless) would be welcome on a comedy show. But Michaels is notoriously anti-improv, because SNL is a pretty precise show. “Every line, every bit of dialogue has a camera cut attached to it,” he explained in a different Vulture interview. “If you’re not where you’re supposed to be, then they’re going to miss the shot.”

Despite the slight miscalculation about “embellishing,” the bit seems to have gone more or less how it was planned. And as for the story he was banned from the show for it, Vulture reports that the rumor “to [Brody’s] knowledge is not true.” However, “I also have never been invited back on,” he says with a laugh, “So I don’t know what to tell you.”

Even if Brody wasn’t formally “banned,” per se, it’s not a stretch to imagine the folks at SNL just didn’t like working with him and don’t want to repeat the experience. Brody recalls that “They were all literally agape from me pitching,” but was their shock that he was pitching things, or from the quality of those pitches? Based on his pitch that did make it to air, we’d guess the latter. But in a 2012 interview, Brody said he’d like to host again: “I had a great time.” He might’ve been the only one.