Donald Glover is glad Saturday Night Live turned him down

Everything happens for a reason, if you believe that sort of thing—and Donald Glover does. Now an acclaimed auteur who owns his own production company slash recording studio slash farm compound, Glover came up in comedy just like anyone else. He started in the writers’ room (at 30 Rock), worked his way to starring on a sitcom (Community), and hustled as a stand-up comic before getting the chance to create his own show (Atlanta). And yes, that path included a requisite audition for Saturday Night Live, something Glover is grateful didn’t work out.

“I dodged so many bullets,” he tells GQ of his 2007 and 2009 auditions (something he mentioned in his monologue when he hosted the show in 2018). “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.” Glover apparently heard through the grapevine that Amy Poehler said he wasn’t chosen for the sketch show “because his stand-up routine lacked a point of view.”

Saturday Night Live wasn’t the only opportunity—or even the only Poehler vehicle—he’s glad to have missed. “Thank God I didn’t get some of those pilots. I wanted so desperately to be on Parks and Rec because it was the cool, hipster show,” he shares. (Glover was seemingly up for the role of Tom Haverford, which went to Aziz Ansari.) “I am the bullet dodger. I feel like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. That wasn’t a mistake, you know? God did that.”

Glover describes the come-up period of his career before Atlanta as a “bad” time, which is an interesting way to describe getting hired as a writer on an Emmy-winning network sitcom while still in college and working steadily ever since. (In fairness, he did describe being viciously booed while opening for Kid Cudi and once getting passed over for a performance at the BET Awards in favor of Kendrick Lamar before becoming a Grammy winner, so he did have his struggles!)

Still, it must be noted that his hiring on 30 Rock “was a diversity thing,” which Fey herself confirmed to Glover, as he previously noted in a 2018 New Yorker profile. (Glover’s hiring was part of the same NBC Diversity Initiative that got Mindy Kaling in The Office writer’s room.) “The last two people who were fighting for the job were me and [black-ish creator] Kenya Barris.” He reveals to GQ. “I didn’t know it was between me and him until later. He hit me one day and he was like, ‘I hated you for years!’” Luckily, both writers managed to land on their feet.