Darrell Hammond calls his Sean Connery SNL impression "the single most successful thing I ever did as a performer"

The Hollywood Reporter

In wake of Connery's death at age 90, Hammond reflected on the creation of his one of his most popular Saturday Night Live characters: Sean Connery on Celebrity Jeopardy! "It was like a last-ditch effort on a Tuesday night around four o'clock in the morning because I had nothing to turn in or sell to any of the writers," Hammond tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I was always taught that an audience needs to understand your premise and kind of agree with it in order to laugh. In other words, you can't educate or show them something new and get them to laugh at the same moment. So I thought, nobody's going to believe Sean Connery doesn't know things, or nobody's going to believe that he hates Alex Trebek. The premise doesn't make any sense. And yet it's one of these instances where the stars were in alignment." Hammond said he knew his Connery was a hit the moment he confused "therapist" with "The Rapist." "And that's not the biggest laugh he ever got by a long shot," he said. "You can hear (the audience) hesitate and want to dip their toe in the water, and then they did a little bit. I'd say we got about 60 percent of the room, and it was a delayed reaction that took place in like a split second, but later in the sketch, they were ready. They knew what the premise was and they wanted more of it. He's one of those guys like (President Bill) Clinton that's so popular — someone actually said this once of Daffy Duck, as well — the character is so popular that you can do anything. You can do slapstick with Sean Connery, you could do drawing-room comedy with Sean Connery — there's no kind of comedy that you can't do when people are so eager to hear from that person." ALSO: Watch Sean Connery's visits with David Letterman.