When Arrow star Stephen Amell isn’t shooting arrows at bad guys or going hardcore on the salmon ladder, he has other projects int the works. He will be appearing in the Susan Saradon-led comedy Whatever Makes You Happy, which shoots later this year, and he also the creator of the Fuck Cancer and Sinceriously charity campaigns. However, one of his biggest goals is to host Saturday Night Live (which just aired its 40th anniversary special), and now we have an idea of how badly he wants this to happen.
To set the story up, on January 2, Amell announced on social media that he wanted to be a guest on Late Night With Seth Meyers before 2015 was over. Less than two months later and with the help of his fans bombarding Meyers’ Twitter page, the actor fulfilled his goal on Monday night. While on the show, Amell told Meyers about the first time they met, which was at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards. The actor had been seated alone at a table with the cast of The Big Bang Theory, and he spotted Meyers before the ceremony began. Said Amell:
So it’s right before the show, and it’s the first year that Tina [Fey] and Amy [Poehler] hosted, and you helped them with some of the writing, correct? So I saw you and I immediately went up to you, because you were still on SNL at the time, to tell you that my dream is to one day host Saturday Night Live.
This was promptly answered by cheers of approval from the audience, but Meyers quipped that Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live, doesn’t actually have a Twitter account. This means the same social media bombardment fans used on Seth probably won’t work on Michaels. Amell went on to say that when he approached Meyers at the ceremony, his words came out disjointed (because he was a fan of Meyers’ work), and Meyers politely excused himself before the actor could finish. Perhaps if he had been able to spit out his words back in 2013 he might have been able to be an SNL host earlier, but hey, it’s never too late to start campaigning.
Amell has developed an enormous social media following since Arrow began, amassing over 3,000,000 Facebook likes, over 730,000 Twitter followers and over 720,000 Instagram followers. His fans may not be able to pester Michaels, but if they sent enough emails, Twitter messages and other communiques to NBC and the official Saturday Night Live social media accounts, the network would eventually respond. If Amell does one day host SNL, there needs to be an Arrow sketch with the SNL cast members playing the roles of Diggle, Felicity, Laurel, Roy and any other characters that can be crammed in. As popular as the superhero series is, it would be awesome if the sketch series parodied it.
In case you want to get an idea of what Amell hosting SNL would look like, while he was at 30 Rockefeller Center, he posted this picture on Facebook of himself on the famous Studio 8H stage, “No photography” signs be damned!
Post by Stephen Amell.
You can check out the full Late Night With Seth Meyers interview with Amell (which includes a humorous anecdote about the actor missing President Bill Clinton at the same award ceremony) in the video below.
