Lucy Lawless Begged Lorne Michaels to Cut Her Stevie Nicks SNL Sketch

If Lucy Lawless had had her way, her cult favorite impersonation of Stevie Nicks may never have happened.

On the latest episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast, the host asked Lawless, 56, about her 1998 appearance on Saturday Night Live. Specifically, Rosenbaum wanted to know all about “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup,” a sketch in which the Xena: Warrior Princess star spoofed Nicks in a commercial for the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman’s imaginary Sedona, Ariz., Tex-Mex restaurant.  

“I’d seen Stevie Nicks on something,” Lawless told Rosenbaum. “She had really black eyes for whatever reason. And I asked them for these — ‘Can I have contacts like that?’ And they got me fitted real quick and then bunged these things in to do the skit. And I couldn’t see anybody, and I was really alone in my head.”

At the time, Nicks was experiencing a career resurgence, thanks to Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 live reunion album The Dance and an accompanying MTV special, as well as her own solo career spanning 1998 box set Enchanted.

In 2020, former SNL writer Hugh Fink explained to The Ringer that the “Fajita Roundup” sketch was meant to play up the singer’s witchy, hippie vibe — complete with a tambourine and a wind machine blowing Lawless’ blond wig in the fake commercial — while also lampooning what a ’70s rock super star might be doing two decades after their heyday.

But, Lawless told Rosenbaum, despite having been a fan of Nicks’s music as a kid, she wasn’t initially sold on the bizarre sketch.

“I’ve got these stupid contacts in right? And I did not think the skit was funny,” she said. “I didn’t understand the cultural references. So maybe that was the magic ingredient is that I didn’t think it was funny.”

In fact, she was so uncertain about the sketch, she actually asked SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels to cut it.

“I said to Lorne, ‘Lorne, dude, you know, it’s not funny. Please cut it,’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘No. No, I think it’s a sleeper hit.’ ”

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It turns out Michaels was right. While “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup” is far from one of SNL’s most famous, it continues to show up on social media to this day. Ahead of Nicks’ October 2024 appearance on SNL — her first since 1983 — more than one fan took to social media hoping that either the singer or host Ariana Grande would revive the sketch.

For her part, Nicks loved the sketch. According to The Ringer, the “Rhiannon” singer told Madison magazine in 2011 that it was “one of my all-time favorite things ever.”

“When everybody told me, I was like, ‘Oh no, it’s going to be just awful …,’ ” Nicks said. “But it wasn’t. Lucy looked amazing, and she was amazing as me. So I could not have been happier.”