Drugs, alcohol, child abuse, destructive parents, mental illness, and self-harm are just several
of the crippling obstacles Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond has survived over
the course of his life.
Beloved by viewers, the star battled many demons.
Here's the tragic real-life story of Hammond.
In his 2011 memoir God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F---ed, Hammond revealed that he suffered
terrible abuse from his mother, Margaret, which he further detailed in the 2018 documentary
about his life, Cracked Up.
In 2011, he told CNN,
"I was a victim of systematic and lengthy brutality.
My mom did some things which have cost me dearly."
As he recalled in his memoir,
"I am getting into the car to go somewhere with my mother.
'Wait,' she says, holding the door open.
'Put your hand there.'
When I do, she slams the door."
Hammond told NPR's Fresh Air in 2011 that his mother tortured him with hammers, knives,
and electrical outlets, and that he repressed the memories of his abuse for much of his
life, only uncovering them later after years of therapy.
He explained,
"I remember the floor being red and me bleeding in a vague sense...I thought it was my fault.
I mean, can you imagine the desperation of a child who chooses to believe that he did
this to himself just so he doesn't have to consider the idea that his mother did it or
his parents did it?"
"Well, when you've suffered abuse in your own home, when you lock the door, the monster's
in there with you."
"Yeah, and there's no point in trying to keep them out, they're already in."
Hammond's father didn't engage in the same kind of physical abuse as his mother.
But as a World War II veteran, he was an alcoholic who suffered from, quote, "dreams of Nazis
and dismembered corpses," as Hammond told CNN, adding that it was "frightening" to be
around him.
In his 2011 Fresh Air interview, Hammond recalled that his father showed him a Nazi gun he took
in combat, and described taking another man's life to get it.
He recalled,
"I was about 12, and he was sitting in the living room, just hammered on gin.
He couldn't really function that well, except as a warrior."
Hammond also revisited his father's passing in a 2019 podcast with the Mount Sinai hospital
network, and explained,
"My father said on his deathbed, his last words, 'I let my anger be more important to
me than my children.
There was nothing as important to me.
It was the only thing that was important to me.'"
Michelle Esrick, the director of Cracked Up, also asserted on the podcast that Hammond's
father may not have physically harmed Hammond, but he still left emotional scars due to his
own unresolved trauma and resulting behavior.
She explained,
"He was punching holes in Darrell's bedroom door when he was a little baby sleeping.
What kind of effect would that have on your system?
He was on the road.
He wasn't attuned to what the mother was doing to Darrell."
Hammond revealed another aspect of his childhood trauma in his interview with Mount Sinai:
his family hired a housekeeper who eventually sexually abused him.
Hammond explained,
"This is in the '50s, '60s.
[We had] a housekeeper who did love me and who touched me every single day.
And that's why they say I didn't turn out to be a criminal."
Esrick connected Hammond's memories of his sexual abuse with one interpretation of trauma
offered in the documentary, saying,
"I remember when I interviewed Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk who's in the film, and I asked
him what's the definition of trauma?
And I thought he was going to say, when you're hit this many times or when you're sexually
abused this many times.
And he said, when you are not seen or known, that is the trauma.
That's it.
When you're not seen or known."
Hammond was diagnosed with an array of mental disorders, including bipolar disorder, manic
depression, and schizophrenia.
He told Fresh Air,
"I've been in treatment since I was 19, and I'm 56.
So that's a couple of bucks and a long time."
He told CNN that his medications were "soul-killing," though they eventually saved his life.
He added,
"I was on as many as seven medications at one time.
Doctors didn't know what to do with me."
Hammond said he suffered from misdiagnoses for years, until he came under the care of
a doctor at the psychiatric facility The Plains in 2010, crediting the work he did there for
helping him realize the psychological roots of his mental health issues.
His doctor told him,
"You are this way because of something that happened to you."
The therapy helped Hammond grasp the extent of his childhood trauma and understand the
way it impacted his brain.
He told The Columbus Dispatch,
"People were approaching me as if mental illness was an airborne virus, as if this had come
from nowhere and a bunch of drugs would fix it.
That's the way it went for a long time."
Hammond self-harmed for decades, and he often engaged in the acts backstage at Saturday
Night Live.
He recalled in his Mount Sinai interview,
"[I] was a lifetime cutter.
I started actually cutting when I was 19 and I cut until about the age of 50, I'm gonna
say 53 maybe?"
Hammond explained in the Cracked Up documentary that he started cutting himself when he began
having flashbacks to his childhood trauma, which he often visualized as the color red,
and he would self-harm as a way to soothe his mind.
He admitted,
"There is a floating red ball of light.
This odd image produced a terror in me.
And the terror would only stop if I cut my wrists."
Additionally, his drinking compounded his tendencies towards self-harm, as he revealed
in his memoir.
Discussing his Saturday Night Live days, he wrote,
"I kept a pint of Remy in my desk at work.
The drinking calmed my nerves and quieted the disturbing images that sprang into my
head...When drinking didn't work, I cut myself."
Hammond explained in his 2011 memoir that he abused cocaine and crack, initially getting
hooked in 2002.
He wrote,
"I'd started adding an obscene amount of cocaine to my binges.
I had to be creative about how I did it without other people catching on or letting it interfere
with the work.
At least too much."
During his final season on Saturday Night Live in 2009, Hammond decided to try crack,
and even spent time in a Harlem crack house.
In 2018, he recounted his crack experimentation to the Daily Beast, adding that a topless
woman recognized him from one of his most famous Saturday Night Live impressions, and
exclaimed,
"That's Clinton!"
Despite his drug use, Hammond has made sure to explain that he never appeared on SNL drunk.
He added,
"I never drank on game day.
I always showed up pretty solid.
There was one morning I drank at 8 a.m.
But that was just once."
Hammond suffered years of debilitating PTSD as a result of his childhood traumas, and
his flashbacks affected him during his Saturday Night Live appearances, including a famous
episode where he played Al Gore debating Will Ferrell's George W. Bush character.
He told Fresh Air in 2011,
"I was disoriented and frightened, and I was feeling every single thing that happened to
me when I was in the kitchen once with my mother."
Speaking with CNN that same year, Hammond recalled,
"There was cutting backstage.
In fact, the week that I did the Gore debates, I believe I was taken away in a straitjacket."
Transported to a New York psychiatric hospital, Hammond described in his memoir that, when
his wife came to visit him, he didn't recognize her.
Looking back on his struggles on-set at SNL, Hammond told Fresh Air that the show's, quote,
"power brokers" knew about his issues, and he was thankful they allowed him to stay on
the show.
He added,
"It was a delicate balance for them and not one that they deserved to have to go through,
but I thought they were very brave about it."
Hammond may have been Saturday Night Live's master impressionist for the years he was
on the show, but he struggled to play John McCain because of the late senator's experiences
with torture as a prisoner in the Vietnam War, as well as his father's own life as a
veteran who was haunted by memories of World War II.
Hammond told CNN in 2011,
"I didn't want to make fun of a guy whose body, soul, and voice were changed by combat.
This is why I had a hard time playing John McCain and didn't want to play John McCain."
The comedian said that his father, who was on his deathbed at the time that Hammond was
approached to play McCain, encouraged him to take the part, oblivious of the childhood
traumas that the character triggered in his son.
Hammond said he didn't think his father was aware of his mother's abuse, which also complicated
his portrayal of McCain, since he could relate to the politician's torture.
The SNL star further explained his reasoning to Fresh Air in 2011, adding that he didn't
want to mock a prisoner of war.
He said,
"If you're injured, it changes the way you move.
If you're injured, it changes the way you talk.
I didn't want to lampoon someone, you know, who had given his life."
Hammond's 2011 memoir reveals that the actor landed in a mental facility a year before
his book was published.
He wrote,
"I was sent to the Sanctuary, a few miles north of New York City, via ambulance in the
fall of 2010 after getting drunk and trying to cut off my arm with a large kitchen knife."
Hammond also described how he entered psychiatric facilities under false names, only to have
fellow patients recognize him and ask him to reprise his Saturday Night Live impressions.
He explained,
"I wasn't in the mood to be recognized while I got myself sorted out, so I checked in under
a false name.
Unlike certain celebrities who like to share their meltdowns with...TMZ, I prefer to bring
the heavens crashing down around me in private."
Following the birth of his daughter in 1998 with his then-wife Elizabeth, Hammond said
that his mother called and offered to watch the little girl, triggering his protective
instincts.
According to Cracked Up, after undergoing therapy, Hammond eventually called his mother
and confronted her about his traumatic upbringing, but she turned him away.
As he told Fresh Air in 2011,
"I called her on the phone and I said, 'I'm being treated for symptoms [similar to] prisoners
of war...but all I did was grow up in your house.
Can you talk to me about that?'"
"And I thought to myself, 'She must have been innocent at one time or another.'"
He remembers his mother telling him in a menacing tone to never call her again, before hanging
up on him.
"She did what she did because of something that happened to her."
The two lost contact until shortly before her passing.
While Hammond had left the Saturday Night Live cast years before Donald Trump became
President, the show brought him back as a featured player to impersonate Trump starting
in late 2015.
He had been playing Trump for over a decade, with his first appearance as the character
dating all the way back to 1999, and took over as SNL's on-air announcer in 2014.
Speaking to The Washington Post in 2017, Hammond said that he moved back to New York in 2016,
planning on assuming a larger role on the show.
But SNL had other plans, with Hammond finding out in September 2016 that instead of him,
Alec Baldwin would be the show's go-to Trump.
He told the outlet,
"I just started crying.
In front of everyone.
I couldn't believe it.
I was in shock, and I stayed in shock for a long time."
Still, Hammond told The Hollywood Reporter that he holds no ill will towards Baldwin,
adding,
"The truth is, I have known Alec for a long time and always enjoyed his company."
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Administration's 24/7 National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.
That's 1-800-662-4357.