Tom Green regrets his Saturday Night Live Drew Barrymore Prank

In 2000, Tom Green pulled a prank with his then-fiancee Drew Barrymore on Saturday Night Live — and he still regrets it.

It’s been 19 years since Tom Green hosted Saturday Night Live, but he still thinks about his November 2000 hosting gig.

In a new episode of The Daily Beast’s The Last Laugh podcast, the actor, talk show host and comedian revealed that he “regrets” taking such big swings in the episode, which featured a fake wedding between him and then-fiancee Drew Barrymore.

Green told The Last Laugh host Matt Wilstein that if he “could go back” he “would do it a lot differently”, and this time, he’d reconsider the wedding bit. Explained the early aughts star, “It just sort of ruined my Saturday Night Live experience.”

Tom Green and Drew Barrymore. Picture: S. Granitz/WireImage/Getty

When Green hosted SNL on November 18, 2000 — at the height of his Charlie’s Angels and MTV talk show fame — rumours about his relationship with Barrymore were all over the tabloids.

In order to poke fun at the press and “prank the audience”, Green came up with an idea for an episode-long gag in which he and Barrymore, his fiancee at the time, get married on-air. “We’ll tell everyone we’re going to get married on SNL and then she won’t show up at the altar at the end and that will be the punchline,” he recalled on The Last Laugh podcast. “Even though we were still getting married, like a month after. That was the bit.”

The couple appeared on Saturday Night Live together in 2000.

Throughout the episode, Green and Barrymore “kept teasing that (they) were going to get married at the end of the show”.

Explained the star, “She’s out in the hallway in her wedding dress, my parents are there in the audience. And then at the end of the show, she doesn’t show up. And the end of my SNL I have a meltdown on stage. And it’s a complete meltdown and the band stops playing and the entire cast disappears and I’m just standing alone on stage at the very end of the show.”

Looking back, Green says the episode’s conclusion is what he regrets most about the experience.

“It does sort of ruin my beautiful Saturday Night Live kumbaya moment,” he told Wilstein. “At the end of every Saturday Night Live, (the host) is hanging out with the cast and celebrating together.” Instead, Green stood alone on stage, yelling, “I thought you loved me!” into the air. “I try not to have regrets, but that is something that I actually regret,” he said. “I think it just sort of ruined my Saturday Night Live experience.”

Unfortunately, the clip of Green and Barrymore’s fake wedding has disappeared from the internet (old SNL clips are notoriously hard to find), but you can listen to him give an oral history of the bit, as well as his experience hosting SNL, on The Last Laugh podcast.

This article originally appeared on Decider and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as Tom Green regrets his Saturday Night Live Drew Barrymore Prank