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ADAM SANDLER:

That’s why I love Rock, because he’s got the balls to say anything he wants to. I think we had quite a cast, no doubt about it. You can list off our guys, and both on the show and hanging out with them, they are the guys that make me laugh the hardest.

When I got there, a lot of guys who were my age, the younger guys on the show, we respected the older guys. We knew that when Dana and Phil and Nealon and Dennis and Jan Hooks went out there, they crushed. They knew what they were doing. And we watched them when we were at home so that when we got there, we were just psyched about getting to say we worked with these guys. And the fact that a lot of younger guys were writers also, it made sense that we had to pay our dues and write stuff, and try to impress those guys and say, “Hey, we wrote you a good sketch — do you mind if I play the busboy?” It 100 percent made sense.

DAVID SPADE:

I remember there was a period when the cast members were bigger stars than the hosts. That was scary. I was thinking Mike Myers is a bigger star than the host, and Dana Carvey is a bigger star than the host. It was weird. After they left, it got back to normal, where the cast was all evened out and the hosts were bigger names.

When I got there, they were saying that Dennis Miller and Dana and Phil were horrible, that was a horrible cast, and then in a couple of years, when I moved up into the cast, they said we were horrible, why can’t we be like Dana and Phil and those guys, back when it was good? And then when we left, they were telling Will Ferrell that when Spade, Farley, and Sandler were there, that’s when it was funny.

JULIA SWEENEY, Cast Member:

I came from the Groundlings. I was performing there for a few years, and I think it seemed like every week an increasingly more important person from SNL would come and watch. And then, in the end, it came down between me and Lisa Kudrow. And so Lorne came and we did like a showcase for me and Lisa — we each got to do three sketches, and I ended up getting chosen. And I remember thinking afterward, “I hope Lisa does okay.”

LISA KUDROW, Host:

Thank God I didn’t get Saturday Night Live! I had met Laraine Newman at the Groundlings, and she let me know that she thought I was really funny and really good. So she called Lorne Michaels and said he should really look at me. Then I found out they were also going to look at Julia Sweeney. Julia and I got to be friends over this. I remember us being on the phone and talking about what a crazy, hideous situation this was for us. There was going to be one show that we were going to do, and based on that one show, a big chunk of our career was going to be decided.

So Lorne came out with Marci Klein, the talent coordinator, and there was one night set aside at the Groundlings for them to look at Julia Sweeney and myself. Julia had a lot of people in the audience. I had some friends in the audience. I even had some good friends who were writers on the show. Conan O’Brien was writing on the show, and I asked him if he could be in the audience. He actually thought that wouldn’t look so good. So I just thought, yeah, the classier route is not to stack the audience. I don’t think I did my best, and, rightly so, they picked Julia.

There’ve been a couple things that I didn’t get or got fired from where friends of mine who had a little more experience said, “It’s always a blessing when a door closes, because another door is going to open.” And there’s no such thing as your whole career being decided in one night. I just kept believing that I was being saved by not doing Saturday Night Live to do something else.

JULIA SWEENEY:

I felt really accepted and encouraged and appreciated right away. In some ways my trajectory was the opposite of other people’s who probably were more successful there in the end. My first show was Jimmy Smits, and I did a sketch with Jimmy right after the “Update” spot, which is like an important sketch spot. And so I felt like I came in with a bang.