Saturday Night Live wasn’t all laughs. During a Tuesday visit to The Tonight Show, Maya Rudolph and host Jimmy Fallon recalled a special moment at the read-through table.
Rudolph recalled pitching a heartfelt tribute to Ferrell during his last read-through in 2002. It never made it onto the air, but it lives on in the memories of those who were there.
“Do you remember Will’s last read-through, when you did Poetry Man and we were all just crying?” Fallon asked Rudolph.
“At the last table read, you write stuff that you know isn’t going to make it on the show, but you just do it to send off the person that you love,” Rudolph explained to the audience. “We did, it was like a parody of the Phoebe Snow song [Poetry Man], but I made it: ‘You’re the comedy man/You make everything alright.’”
“Dude, we all lost it,” Fallon remembered. “There was like, five sketches that were just like, ‘We love you, Will.’ Like, that’s all they really said. It’s like, ‘We love you, dude. We miss you.’”
Fallon said it can be difficult to “say goodbye” to a fellow cast member. “You root for them, obviously,” he said. “But you miss the times that you have.”
Rudolph added that they were all “so, so, so lucky that we had that time together. And that it’s documented! Because now we can look back and watch it,” she said. “But we really had some golden times.”