Show up for a taping of Saturday Night Live, and the gift shop will sell you a T-shirt to remember your night at 30 Rock. Kevin Nealon also came away with a souvenir after his nine seasons on the show: a nasty case of claustrophobia.
Blame SNL’s makeup department, which put Nealon through the wringer while creating a rubber monster-chin for a 1990 Jay Leno sketch. The process sounds harrowing.
“They need to make a prosthetic chin for me, right?” Nealon told Ted Danson on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “So they got to do that life mask, I think it’s called, or death mask. It’s plaster, and I’ve never had it done before. They cover you with plastic so it doesn’t drip on you. And they cover up your ears, and your mouth is closed. Straws in the nose. And they start putting plaster all over you.”
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Nealon never considered he’d have an issue until the plaster started to harden. “It starts to get warm. And it’s hard,” he said. “And you’re thinking, ‘Oh my god, all that’s open is my nostrils. If they close those up, I’ll suffocate.”
The comic tried to keep his cool but felt himself starting to panic. He began pulling at the plaster, begging the makeup artists to take it off. The next thing he knew, someone was waving smelling salts under his nose after he fainted.
Turns out that Nealon had good reason to be terrified. Five years later, SNL host Jeff Daniels underwent the same treatment — except it was so much worse. Daniels was getting fitted for a prosthetic nose to play Liam Neeson and went through the same plaster procedure. But the makeup artist used the wrong mixture, and they couldn’t get the hardened plaster off Daniels’ face. At one point, they even tried a hammer. Eventually, a plastic surgeon had to carefully remove the mask with an X-ACTO knife, all while a nauseous Daniels tried to breathe through two straws. It took six shots of Novocain to the face to numb the actor for the live show.
As for Nealon? Once he regained consciousness and was pulled off the floor, he decided to go through the entire process all over again. “I wanted to get it done,” he said. “I wanted to play Jay Leno, and I almost passed out again.”
Unfortunately for Nealon, the sensation of being suffocated stayed with him. “Two weeks later, I’m stopped in a subway between stations. It’s dark. I started getting that same feeling again and it just snowballed. … It became almost agoraphobic.”
It took Nealon almost two years to work through his phobia. And to add insult to injury, Peacock edited out the Leno sketch from that Season 15 streaming episode. If you’re going to make a man suffer for his Leno art, let us appreciate the chin Nealon struggled so hard for.
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