It was 1998. Furbys were newly terrifying. Fruit Gushers were delicious. Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman were in love. And nobody knew who Jimmy Fallon was.
Fallon stopped by Alec Baldwin's podcast, "Here's The Thing," and Tuesday's episode talked about his rise to fame and how he found himself behind the "Tonight Show" desk. But what we found especially memorable was his revelation that a certain celebrity was his style icon in the '90s.
It was pre-SNL, and Fallon described how he looked for his second audition: "My outfit is awful. I look like I'm auditioning for Cirque du Soliel, everything was so tight. A tight brown shirt. My hair was spiked up, because I saw a picture of -- I'm gonna forget her name now. Actress. She's British. She had spiky hair."
Then it hit him: Kate Beckinsale. "She had short, spiky hair and it was cute. So I changed my hair to look like Kate Beckinsale's hair."
"Kate Beckinsale is the barometer for you in terms of fashion," Baldwin said.
"A lot of people think it's Brando, no. For me, it was Kate Beckinsale."
Six weeks later, during a meeting with SNL showrunner Lorne Michaels in LA, Fallon says Michaels asked him: "'Jimmy, do you wear wigs?'" and Fallon said, "'Oh, I do this to my hair.' I wasn't going to say Kate Beckinsale, but I said, 'I spike it up,' and he goes, 'No, I mean in character, do you wear wigs? Because we want you for the show.'"
"I almost started crying. I said, 'I'm going to make you proud.' I think that was the last thing I said to him: 'I'm going to make you proud.'"
Moral of the story for anybody who wants to make in on SNL: Either Lorne appreciates talent or Kate Beckinsale. You may do what you want with that information.
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