Mark Ruffalo Reveals Why He Turned Down Hosting ‘SNL’: ‘I’ll Never Be Asked Back’
Mark Ruffalo has never hosted “Saturday Night Live,” and he doesn’t think he’ll be asked to again after turning down Lorne Michaels.
On Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast on Monday, Ruffalo told the host that he’s “scared” to take up the gig and he’ll probably “never be asked back” after he rejected Lorne Michaels’ invitation to Studio 8H.
“I’ll never be asked back,” Ruffalo said. “I don’t think Lorne Michaels likes it when you say no. It just scared the living s–t out of [me]. I don’t know.”
Ruffalo specified that reading live on-camera from cue cards is what causes him the most anxiety.
“It scares me. I’m dyslexic. I’m not gonna lie. You don’t lie on this show,” the actor said, and Maron asked him how dyslexic he was. “I’ll lose where I’m at on the page. When I hear about how that show works, changing things at the last second, and I want to be good at it. I’ve been watching that my whole life and like, I don’t want to be the guy, the host who sucks. I owe Lorne Michaels more than that.”
Trying to find a silver lining, Maron suggested that Ruffalo might be better memorizing lines instead of reading them from the cards — but no dice.
“I have the double whammy. I’m dyslexic, and I have a hard time memorizing stuff. Like, I have to start so early,” Ruffalo said.
“What am I going to do? Ginkgo, now it’s wasabi. I chase all the memory s–t,” Ruffalo said. “I try everything. I’ve tried everything across the board.”
The Marvel actor, who portrayed the Incredible Hulk and Dr. Bruce Banner in the multiverse movies starting with “The Avengers,” revealed that it takes him four hours to read a 60- to 90-page script the first time. He joked that it takes him longer than the actual movie runtime to read the script.
“So that’s interesting because your dyslexia enables your type of concentration that other people don’t have,” Maron summarized.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.
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