Will Ferrell had a “dark” feeling about “robots” and the future of Hollywood 30 years ago, his castmate Molly Shannon revealed.
During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday, Shannon recalled the early career moment when the prediction hit her now-longtime friend.
“One night when we were at SNL, we had just started, and I was so excited, like, ‘Oh my God, this job’s so great.’ And Will was kind of dark, and he was like, ‘I don’t know. Who knows how long this is going to last?’ This was 30 years ago,” she explained. “He goes, ‘I really don’t think, I don’t know… It’s not going to last long, and I think actors are eventually going to be replaced by robots, and they’re not going to need human actors anymore.”
“I was like, ‘What, are you crazy?’ Like I was like, ‘You’re being so dark,’” Shannon recalled. “I thought he was crazy. And he said, ‘But you know, it would be fine because I could have a job working as a dog groomer or as a UPS driver or as a coach and still be happy.’ And I was like, ‘OK.’ But we went down like a dark street.”
“But Will was right!” Shannon added, as the Screen Actors Guild fights for protections for actors amid the industry’s embrace of artificial intelligence. “And we die laughing about it now,” she said.
Quipped Kimmel, “Who knew Will Ferrell was some kind of a dark lord?”
Ferrell and Shannon overlapped at SNL from 1996 to 2001, and later appeared together as the fictional news anchors Cord Hosenbeck and Tish Cattigan, co-hosting the Rose Parade for Amazon Prime Video in 2018.
The pair reunite in the upcoming comedy series, The Hawk, in which Ferrell plays a golfing legend, and Shannon will play his “foul-mouthed ex-wife Stacy,” according to Deadline. The series will premiere on Netflix this summer.
Shannon told Kimmel about how they first met on Thursday. “I worked at a coffee place, Melrose Baking Company, like a cappuccino scone place,” Shannon recalled. “And a comedian from the Groundlings, Patricia Carter, said, she goes, ‘Molly, I really want you to meet this really funny guy from the Groundlings named Will Ferrell.’ So, she brought him into the restaurant, and I waited on him. We clicked right away,” she said. “I brought him a scone and a latte. And we’ve been friends ever since. 30 years.”
The iconic SNL cast member, also known for her roles on Will & Grace and The White Lotus, said she met many celebrities pre-fame in her waitressing days.
She recalled seeing Friends star Jennifer Aniston, “I was just studying her from my hostess booth,” she said. “She was preparing for lunch with her agents, and she got there early to check the table, and I was like studying what it’s like to be a superstar. It was before she was on Friends…and I was like ‘Wow, this girl is extreme, she is going to go to big things.”
She also remembered being struck by Julia Roberts’ breakfast order. “Julia Roberts used to come in too for breakfast,” Shannon said. “She just ordered sausage. And I was like, that’s so interesting… Superstars eat sausage.”
