Off Like a Rocket

In 1981, Charles Rocket said a single, unscripted word on “Saturday Night Live” that arguably changed his career. The inadvertent utterance also altered the look of the switchboards over at NBC, as they suddenly turned very bright.

Rocket was canned shortly after the incident, but has recovered from his aborted stint on the long-running TV show. Consider his two recent releases “Earth Girls Are Easy” and “How I Got Into College.” Both are comedies. Rocket plays a philandering hubby to Geena Davis in the former, and an obnoxious campus administrator in the latter.

“It is fun to play the bad guys,” says Rocket. “But it’s kind of dangerous too, in a way, because if you do a good job then people think you’re really like that.”

Like many actors, Rocket is drawn to the big screen, but this shouldn’t be attributed to the bad taste left in his mouth from the “SNL” brouhaha. He simply believes that movies convey more quality.

“I’m not really a fan of a lot of what they do on television,” says the actor, who played yet another creep a few years back on the short-lived series “Max Headroom.” “They continue to repeat themselves. If there’s a hit movie, everybody will want to make a series based on that, which really annoys me. But television really has supported me (financially) more than film has, so I can’t really complain about it.”

Rocket does express annoyance at NBC’s handling of his case eight years ago.

“I wasn’t the first to have made that error, that mistake, that slip,” says Rocket, in the calmest of tones. “People who had said that intentionally were heralded as heroes just one year before me.”