Original Saturday Night Live castmember Jane Curtin admitted that she didn’t have a lot of hope for the show’s first season in 1975.
Ahead of the NBC sketch comedy series’ season 50 premiere on Saturday, the actress-comedian spoke with The New York Times and looked back at SNL‘s first broadcast on Oct. 11, 1975, noting that the whole night felt like a blur.
“I never really paid much attention to the audience,” Curtin recalled. “I thought, well, anybody that’s watching this must be really stupid. It gave me a lot of angst. So the way I dealt with it was, I was in this bubble, and we had a job to do within the bubble.”
Even in the weeks leading up to the big debut episode, the 3rd Rock from the Sun actress faced a lot of anxiety, questioning why she was even on the show.
“I was quiet and nobody paid any attention to me. I didn’t know how to pitch. I had never had to do that in my life,” she recounted of that time, but eventually trusted she would have roles on opening night. “I figured, well, they hired me. They’re paying me. So it would be foolish of them not to use me.”
Later, once the show started gaining attention, the Kate & Allie alum said her life outside of SNL completely changed. “You’d pass by people and they would shake,” she said. “They had a physical reaction to you, because they could feel the energy behind what was happening at 30 Rock. And it was very, very exciting.”
Curtin, one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, starred alongside Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Michael O’Donoghue and George Coe in the first season. She stayed with SNL until 1980 before finding success with other shows.
Curtin is also being portrayed by Kim Matula in Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night, which dramatizes the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of the sketch comedy show. The movie opens wide on Oct. 11.
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