Country music star Morgan Wallen will return to Saturday Night Live next week despite the multiple controversies surrounding both his debut appearance on the show in 2020 and being caught on tape using the N-word.
SNL announced that Wallen would be joining Anora star —and newly crowned Best Actress Oscar-winner—Mikey Madison when she hosts on March 29, five years after the country music star had his first ever musical guest appearance on the show canceled.
It all started when video surfaced showing Wallen partying without a mask and kissing multiple people during the height of COVID in 2020, SNL canceled his appearance at the last minute (replacing him with Jack White), though he returned to do the show a few months later. Wallen acknowledged that the behavior was “short-sighted” at the time.
When he finally had that debut in Dec. 2020, the show opted to face the controversy over his initial cancellation with a sketch poking fun at the unmasked partying video. Alongside host Jason Bateman and Bowen Yang, who play younger versions of Wallen in the sketch, the singer fictionalizes his thoughts about the controversy, with Bateman’s character joking that NBC execs forced show boss Lorne Michaels to nix his SNL performance.
Not long after that, however, Wallen found himself in the hot seat again when TMZ obtained video of him using the n-word while stumbling home after a night out with friends in Nashville. Though the blowback was intense enough for the country star to attempt to answer for his actions in a lengthy interview with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, his music streams increased 500 percent.
Asked whether he sees that as a sign of racism in country music, Wallen told Strahan he “hadn’t really thought about that.” He’d agreed to sit down with the NAACP to discuss his actions and their impact, but reportedly blew it off as he returned to performing and business as usual.
That week, SNL’s “Weekend Update” made a joke about that controversy when Michael Che remarked of Wallen’s racial slur, “Hmm, wonder who he learned that from...” before showing a photo of the singer with his co-anchor Colin Jost.
The star’s career continued on without any particular repercussions, including after the violent chair throwing incident that landed him seven days in jail and two years of probation last year. And now SNL is seemingly taking advantage of Wallen’s ability to bring in more red-state viewers.
Michaels has made been clear about his desire to keep the show from being “one-sided”—most recently through his continued embrace of and conservative-friendly comedian Shane Gillis, who was invited back last month to the show to host for a second time since he was fired as a cast member for using a slur against Chinese people in 2019.
Some social media reactions suggest SNL fans aren’t necessarily pleased with Wallen’s return to the show, particularly alongside new starlet Mikey Madison. “They put Mikey on the episode with Morgan smfh,” wrote one, while another agreed that Madison “deserves a better musical guest.”
