Chevy Chase is defending his reputation following the premiere of a damning documentary about his life.
The original Saturday Night Live star, along with the director CNN’s I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, sat for an interview with The New York Times in which he again insisted that he is “not racist.”
Chase played Pierce Hawthorne on the sitcom Community for four seasons from 2009 to 2013, until he allegedly used the N-word to criticize a storyline involving a blackface puppet and abruptly quit the show. Chase told the New York Times that he was “misunderstood” at the time.
“It was too great a misunderstanding of what I was saying and not saying,” Chase said, addressing the slew of conflicts at the time. Prior to the N-word incident, Chase also clashed with show creator Dan Harmon. A leaked voicemail from Chase to Harmon in 2012 revealed Chase’s gripes with his character.
“This is not my kind of comedy,” he told Harmon in the leaked audio, “I thought you hired me for what I can do that’s funny. You’ve got to give me some range.”
Chase addressed the controversies in the new interview without naming names. “
I thought that there was at least one person—and another who, for some ungodly reason, didn’t get me, didn’t know who I was, or didn’t realize for one second I’m not racist,” he said. “They were too young to be aware of my work. Instead, there was some sort of visceral reaction from them.” He echoed sentiments he’d previously expressed to Harmon on voicemail when he told the publication, “It wasn’t a bad experience. I just didn’t think it was that good, the show.”
At the time Chase used the N-word on set, his African-American costars Donald Glover and Yvette Nicole Brown were reportedly present, but the slur was not directed at them. He apologized before his abrupt exit from the series.
Still, not one of his co-stars from the series wanted to participate in Chase’s documentary to talk about his time on the show.
Brown cryptically addressed the incident in an Instagram post last week, insisting that “if I have something to say, I have NO problem saying it,” while declining to address the matter in detail, as “it is beneath me.”
Other friends and collaborators of Chase’s, including Goldie Hawn, Lorne Michaels, Ryan Reynolds, and Martin Short, do appear in the doc.
