“SNL” saluted the 25th anniversary of the release of “Jurassic Park” with a parody of audition screen tests that featured just about every big-name Hollywood and TV actor and comedian — from 1992.
The sketch was not only a hilarious series of impressions that featured most of the “SNL” cast, but it was also a nostalgia trip for a different time in entertainment history.
It kicked off with Alex Moffat as Hugh Grant, auditioning for the role of Dr. Alan Grant, which Sam Neill actually played in the movie. Other high-profile ’90s stars to pop up at the casting call included Pee-Wee Herman (played by Mikey Day), comedian Sinbad (played by Kenan Thompson), Whoopi Goldberg (Leslie Jones), Drew Barrymore (Heidi Gardner), Gwen Stefani (Melissa Villasenor) and Adam Sandler (Pete Davidson).
Chris Redd’s impression of Wesley Snipes — at the time one of the biggest action stars in the world — included some truly bad financial advice. Snipes, who popped up to voice a cartoon called Mr. DNA that explains how dinosaur cloning works in the film, told someone off-screen that the IRS can’t tax your money if you spend it. Of course, in real life, Snipes was sentenced to three years in prison for failing to file federal tax returns.
Kate McKinnon showed up with several auditions for the sketch, including as the low-key 1990s version of Ellen DeGeneres and “Friends” star Lisa Kudrow. McKinnon also channeled Jodie Foster as her “Silence of the Lambs” character, Clarice Starling — a performance for which Foster won the Best Actress Oscar. When the producers asked McKinnon’s Foster to try her Mr. DNA audition a little happier, she whispered, “This is the happiest I’ve ever been; it’s my birthday.”
Thompson had a couple of turns during the sketch, but his funniest was as O.J. Simpson, telling producers how he “hypothetically” would have released the dinosaurs from their pens, a major plot point in the movie. The joke was a reference to the 2007 book “If I Did It,” which includes Simpson’s “hypothetical” descriptions of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1994. Simpson was accused of the crimes but acquitted.
“Man, 1992. It is good to be O.J. right now,” Thompson’s O.J. went on.
The “SNL” episode’s host, Bill Hader, also turned up to offer quite a few impressions, including Alan Alda (as Muldoon, the English game warden for the park famous for the line, “Clever girl,” before getting eaten by dinosaurs) and Al Pacino as John Hammond, the eccentric park owner who was played by Richard Attenborough in the movie. Hader’s Pacino had a particularly rough time during the audition, ending his line — “Welcome to Jurassic Park” — with the improv exclamation, “You dumb f—!”
When the producers let Pacino know that the movie was meant to be PG, Pacino pretty much took himself out of the running.
Watch the sketch above.