Amy Poehler had scary incident with chimpanzee on ‘SNL’: ‘I started screaming’

Amy Poehler is recalling a bananas experience she had backstage on SNL.

The Parks and Recreation star detailed a frightening experience she had with a chimp named Mikey while working on Saturday Night Live during an episode of her podcast Good Hang.

“One time I was doing a sketch where I think Jason Bateman was the host and there was a monkey in the sketch,” she said, describing Mikey as “formidable” and noting her distaste for working with animal actors. “I don’t like them. It’s too stressful for me. And it was a young chimpanzee.”

Poehler said that Mikey made unwanted contact with her in between sketches. “I walked past the chimpanzee and it reached out and grabbed me by the wrist and wouldn’t let go in the middle of a quick change,” she said. “I think it was the blonde hair or my vibe. And I started screaming. And chimpanzees are very strong.”

She added, “I couldn’t get it to let go of me,” but said that eventually “it was all fine.”

Poehler was not the only performer who Mikey accosted during his brief tenure at Studio 8H. Bateman discussed a similarly troubling experience with the simian performer during his monologue when he returned to host SNL in 2020.

“Things were so loose that at the end of the show, at goodnights, the monkey was allowed to take a bow with us up here,” the Arrested Development star said. “We’re all hugging, we’re saying goodnight, the credits are rolling, and then the monkey tried to kill me. Truly, I bent down to say, ‘Good job’ to the monkey. You know, bein’ nice. I’m a nice fella. But not the chimp. The chimp unhinges his jaw, he flashes the teeth, and he tries to bite my entire nose off.”

Bateman tried to explain Mikey’s behavior. “Apparently this is a thing with chimps, I guess,” he said. “They hate that humans have faces, and they wanna remove them. I don’t know. Maybe he got a good look at this nose and thought I wasn’t gonna miss half of it.”

The 2020 episode also showed slowed-down footage from the 2005 incident, in which Bateman leans down to Mikey for a kiss — and the ape wraps his teeth around the actor’s lips.

“I survived, and after the show, I was told by the animal handlers that Mikey, the monkey, wanted to apologize, truly,” Bateman recalled during his monologue. “My first thought was that this is a trap, he wants more, he’s still snacky. But I decided that everyone deserves a second chance.”

The host then joked, “The monkey was destroyed later that night. It was my choice. Lessons have to be learned. But I would like to think that if he was here with us tonight to see me host 15 years later, he would probably rip my nuts off.”