‘SNL’ host Michael Keaton got pep talk from Dana Carvey

Michael Keaton always kills it hosting Saturday Night Live — but he needed a little reassurance backstage before his latest appearance on the show.

Dana Carvey, who has returned to SNL in the last four episodes playing Joe Biden, revealed that the Spotlight star didn’t feel confident about his live comedy skills before shooting his episode last week. “Michael Keaton has a lot of just personal energy,” Carvey said on his podcast Fly on the Wall. “After the dress show, he’s like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t do this this often. I don’t know what the f— I’m doing out there,’ you know?”

Carvey doesn’t think anybody should be confident hosting the show. “I said, ‘Nobody does. This is really hard. So all you got to do is say, “What the f–” and have fun,'” he recalled telling Keaton. “Then he nails it on air, hysterical. There you go, he’s a pro.”

Elsewhere in the podcast, Carvey explained the genesis of Keaton’s Beetlejuice-adjacent monologue, which costarred Mikey Day and Andy Samberg. “Mikey Day’s favorite film is Beetlejuice,” he said. “He’s been obsessed with doing Beetlejuice on the show. Never had a chance. So that was his idea of the monologue. And it was a dream come true, because I guess he was like eight or something when Beetlejuice came out. He got possessed by it.”

Although some hosts resist returning to their most popular characters and projects when they come to SNL, Carvey said that Keaton seemed totally comfortable revisiting the ghost with the most — especially since this year’s sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has become a massive hit. “When you do a movie…in the 80s, and then you go all the way to 2024, and it’s a big hit movie, hundreds of millions worldwide — you just got to feel good about that,” he said. “He hasn’t lost his step. He was Beetlejuice. It wasn’t like, ‘Here comes old guy Beetlejuice.’ He’s just on fire.”

Carvey also recounted a Beetlejuice story involving Alec Baldwin, who appeared alongside Keaton in the 1988 Tim Burton comedy and performed on last week’s SNL ep. “I walked in the studio and saw three of his little boys that were so cute,” he recalled. “‘Hey, dad, hey, dad.’ It was adorable. And then he said that he showed them Beetlejuice. It was a picture. He showed him, because Alec Baldwin was in Beetlejuice in the eighties, and he says, ‘That’s Daddy.'”

The Baldwin boys didn’t believe it. “They said, ‘That’s not Daddy,'” Carvey continued. “You know how little kids are. ‘That’s not daddy.’ Then they pointed to Beetlejuice and said, ‘That’s Daddy.’ I don’t know, maybe they’re kidding with him.”

Watch the full Fly on the Wall ep above.