Michael Che says that Kanye West eventually apologized to him for a comment he made during his infamous rant on Saturday Night Live in 2018.
Che, 42, admitted he doesn’t like talking about the incident, but that the rapper found him on a return trip to SNL and said he was sorry.
“It was the Eddie Murphy show, and every Black person in Hollywood was at this show,” the Weekend Update coanchor recalled on Thursday, September 25, in a radio interview with Big Jay Oakerson and Robert Kelly. “Like, literally. It was crazy. It was people that had never came to SNL.”
“I had a lot in that show and I was running around crazy and people were just in my dressing room kind of using it as their green room,” he continued. “I’m walking through the hallway and [Kanye’s] coming out the elevator bay and as soon as he sees me, he goes, ‘I owe you an apology.’”
“And I hadn’t seen him in years,” he said. “I didn’t even know if he remembered that that happened because he was saying so much. And he was like, ‘I owe you an apology.’ And we talked and I was like, I never brought it up again.”
West’s rant came as he was performing “Ghost Town” on the September 29, 2018 episode. He unexpectedly launched into a speech where he alleged he was “bullied” backstage for wearing a Make America Great Again hat and defended his support of President Donald Trump. He also gestured toward Che as he made a comment about Black comedians making jokes about Bill Cosby.
Che confronted him backstage after-the-fact, and the footage was recently unveiled in the documentary In Whose Name.
“That was f***ed up,” Che tells him in the clip, adding, “Why you gotta call me out on the f***in’ [stage] if I don’t got a chance to say anything for myself?”
West then argued he was actually talking about Che’s castmate Leslie Jones, telling Che, “I love you though, bro.”
“I love you too. I’m a fan,” Che responded. “But why would you do that to me? I work here! I work here! Come on, man.”
He continued, “We treat everybody that come in like family, and you’re gonna sell us out? That’s f***ed up, man! We look up to you, we love you. What you got against us?”
Later in his interview, Che said that he and his fellow cast members noticed West was acting differently the night of his rant.
“It didn’t seem like he was his normal self,” he said. “Because he’d been at the show a million times. So it seemed like he was kind of not behaving like himself. So we were just like, ‘What’s going on?’ We were trying very hard.”
Kenan Thompson, who was also on stage while West performed, recalled in the documentary SNL 50: Beyond Saturday Night that he left the stage as soon as he realized the rapper was about to speak.
“When he grabbed the mic, and was just wandering around, you could see that he was gearing up to say something. I was like, ‘I’m out!'” Thompson said. “It would have been cool if he just had did the music thing, and, I don’t know, just spoke through the hat, I guess, ’cause the hat was loud.”
