Saturday Night Live star Michael Che has revealed that Kanye West apologized to him years later for a dig he made during his 2018 appearance on the show.
The controversial 48-year-old rapper — now the subject of the new documentary In Whose Name? — appeared on the long-running NBC sketch series as a guest performer.
During the episode, West went off on an unscripted rant, telling the audience at one point: “You can’t always have, every time you have a Black subject matter like [Bill] Cosby, that you have to have a Black comedian talking about him.”
Afterwards, Che, 42, confronted West backstage. In a now-viral clip revealed in the documentary of their heated exchange, the “Weekend Update” coanchor asks the “Heartless” rapper: “I’m the Black comedian that made a joke about Cosby. That’s f***ed up. Why’d you do that to me?”
“Aw man, I love you, bro,” West responds, as Che says, “I love you too, but why would you do that to me? I work here. I work here. Like, c’mon man, we treat everybody that come in like family, and you’re gonna sell us out? Like that’s f***ed up, man. We look up to you, we love you. What you got against us?”
“I mean, I do have some things against SNL in general,” West admits, with Che acknowledging, “That’s cool, but I mean airing it out like that without letting us be able to reply is kind of foul. You wait til the last song and then say that foul s*** to us.”
“You right, you right,” West concurs before Che walks away.
Appearing Thursday on SiriusXM’s radio show The Bonfire, Che was questioned by host Robert Kelly whether that was “the last time you talked to [West]” or if they’ve talked since.
“No, actually. And that’s another reason why I don’t really like talking about it,” Che said. “Because the next time I saw him was years later, I remember. It was the Eddie Murphy show, and every Black person in Hollywood was at this show. Like, literally. It was crazy. It was people that had never came to SNL.”
Che remembered: “I’m walking through the hallway and [Kanye’s] coming out the elevator bay and as soon as he sees me, he goes, ‘I owe you an apology.’
“And I hadn’t seen him in years. I didn’t even know if he remembered that that happened because he was saying so much. And he was like, ‘I owe you an apology.’ And we talked and I was like, I never brought it up again.”
From 18-year-old filmmaker Nico Ballesteros, In Whose Name? features exclusive and intimate, never-before-seen footage of West — now known as Ye — who in recent years has come under fire for making a string of antisemitic remarks.
“What began as a silent observation evolved into a profound journey of artistic and personal growth,” an official logline reads. “Immersed in Ye’s world of extremes, [Ballesteros] bore witness to brilliance and breakdowns, triumphs and turmoil, but also observed the paranoia and intensity that increasingly shaped Ye’s world.”
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