'SNL' Star Michael Che Reveals Kanye West Apologized for His Rant: 'It Didn't Seem Like He Was His Normal Self'

Michael Che said Kanye West once pulled him aside to apologize after his infamous 2018 political rant on Saturday Night Live.

At the time, West showed up on stage in his red Make America Great Again hat. As the live episode wrapped, he insisted the cast stay on stage while he spoke to the audience, defending his support for Donald Trump. He even said the cast had tried to “bully” him into taking off the hat and addressed people calling him out for backing a “racist” president.

One year later, when Eddie Murphy hosted SNL in 2019, Che and West ran into each other again — which is when the rapper caught him off guard.

“Every Black person in Hollywood was at this show,” Che recalled he told SiriusXM’s "The Bonfire" on Thursday, September 25. “I had a lot in that show, and I was running around crazy and people were just in my dressing room kind of using it as their green room. I had no place to really go.”

“He’s coming out the elevator bay, and as soon as he sees me, he goes, ‘I owe you an apology,’” Che said. “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 never brought it up again.”

Looking back, Che said something was off with the "Vultures" rapper.

“It didn’t seem like he was his normal self,” he admitted. “Because he’d been at the show a million times. So it seemed like he was kind of not behaving like himself. So we were just like, ‘What’s going on?’ We were trying very hard.”

“When that happened, and he made it seem like we was bullying him, I was like, ‘Why would you say that?’ Like, what happened that you felt that way?” he said.

Clips of their tense exchange later appeared in the unauthorized Ye documentary In Whose Name. In one scene, Che pressed West directly: “Why you gotta call me out on the f-----’ [stage] if I don’t got a chance to say anything for myself? I’m the Black comedian that made a joke about [Bill] Cosby.”

He added, “We treat everybody that come in like family, and you’re gonna sell us out? We look up to you, we love you. What you got against us?”

West's documentary, released September 19, pulled back the curtain on the musician's private life, highlighting his struggles with bipolar disorder, the fallout from his marriage and the public backlash.

His ex-wife Kim Kardashian even appeared, saying, “Your personality was not like this a few years ago.”

West also addressed his mental health on David Letterman’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. When asked if his diagnosis was like a brain mechanism “malfunctioning or taking a break,” West explained what goes through his head.

“I can just tell you what I'm feeling at the time, and I feel a heightened connection with the universe when I'm ramping up,” he said, calling it a health issue. “This — it's like a sprained brain, like having a sprained ankle. And if someone has a sprained ankle, you're not going to push on him more. With us, once our brain gets to a point of spraining, people do everything to make it worse.”