Lorne Michaels knew when it was time to show Chris Farley “tough love” amid his drug addiction.
During an appearance on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, biographer Susan Morrison — who wrote Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live — revealed how the head of the NBC sketch comedy show changed his approach to handling addiction among SNL cast members following John Belushi’s death in 1982.
“When Belushi died, it really hit him hard,” Morrison said of Michaels, 80. “And I think he felt like this whole approach of just letting people do their own thing on their own time, this was the wrong approach. We’re a tribe, we’re a group, and we have to look out for each other.”
“And so by the time Chris Farley comes along ten years later or whatever, from the beginning, he clearly had addiction issues,” she added. “Lorne would call him into his office and give him these talks about the drinking or the drugs.”
In fact, Morrison recalled Bob Odenkirk — who was an SNL writer from 1987 to 1991 — telling her that Farley was “excited” to be called into Michaels’ office, adding, “It was like the kind of thrill of being in the principal’s office, but at the same time, you’re getting in trouble.”
“He couldn’t metabolize it, but Lorne had really changed his approach. He would ban Farley from the show for weeks at a time if he was too f—ed up. And he sent him to a series of really tough love rehab places. And obviously, it didn’t do it for him.”
In 1997, Farley died from an overdose of cocaine and morphine in Chicago.
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Morrison further detailed Farley’s drug abuse while starring on Saturday Night Live in her biography of Lorne.
“After getting clean once and relapsing, he’d been suspended by Michaels, who sent him to a tough-love rehab facility in Alabama,” she wrote, per Entertainment Weekly. “Michaels knew that the show was what Farley liked best, so taking it away from him, he hoped, would make an impression.”
The author also addressed Farley’s return to the late-night show in October 1997 amid his struggles with drug addiction and just two months before he died.
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“Farley’s manager, Marc Gurvitz, had asked for the hosting gig as a favor: he thought that, for Farley, being back at 8H might have a stabilizing effect,” she wrote in the book. “Michaels agreed. The discipline and rigor of SNL, he always believed, helped keep people straight.”
That belief has led him to support Pete Davidson, who sought treatment to address issues related to PTSD and borderline personality disorder in 2023, and John Mulaney, who has been open about his sobriety journey, according to Morrison.
“I think he’s been pretty hands on in guiding Pete Davidson through his different issues and Mulaney,” she shared on the Armchair Expert podcast. “And they all talk about how Lauren is a really helpful person to talk to about it. So I think that he definitely realized, okay, I can play a role here. But also, I never saw any drugs in the time that I spent over there in the last number of years.”
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Since Farley’s death, his friends in the comedy world have kept his spirit and memory alive, including Adam Sandler writing and performing a tribute song for him as well as David Spade and Dana Carvey releasing a two-part tribute special on their Fly on the Wall podcast around the 25th anniversary of Farley’s death in 2022.
Actor Josh Gad is also slated to direct an upcoming biopic on Farley’s life, starring Paul Walter Hauser as the late star. The movie will be based on the book The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts, written by Farley’s brother Tom with Tanner Colby. Michaels is producing.
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