You’d be hard-pressed to find a famous Hollywood actor who didn’t attend Sunday’s prime-time 50th anniversary special for Saturday Night Live, but few drew as much enthusiasm as Jack Nicholson, who made a rare public appearance to introduce his longtime pal—and onetime Anger Management costar—Adam Sandler during the broadcast.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Adam Sandler!” cheered Nicholson as the camera cut to the stage, where the Sandman was wielding an acoustic guitar.
“Yeah, baby! Let’s hear it for Jack,” Sandler replied. “Jack made it out tonight! Love you, brother.”
At 87, Nicholson has lived a life in which he proverbially “made it out tonight” more often than most of us could ever dream, and still the actor looked as cool and raffish as ever. He wore a dark Giorgio Armani suit, a navy wool beret stitched with the New York Yankees logo, and purple-tinted sunglasses by the modish eyewear brand Jacques Marie Mage.
(Funnily enough, the Oscar winner’s 26-year-old grandson, the actor-model Duke Nicholson, recently starred in a Jacques Marie Mage campaign alongside his girlfriend, fellow model Devon Lee Carson, in which the couple channeled a ’70s-era Jack Nicholson and his then-partner, Anjelica Huston. Lots of metatextual layers going on there.)
Celebrity stylist Jamie Mizrahi, who also works with The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White and Netflix breakout Cooper Koch, dressed Nicholson for the occasion. The day after the SNL50 special, Nicholson was photographed in New York City wearing another Mizrahi-styled ensemble, which included an Armani overcoat, yellow-lensed Oliver Peoples shades, slip-on Merrell shoes (a sturdy but knowingly cool footwear choice), and, naturally, the same Yankees beret.
For context, Jack Nicholson has owned a Yankees beret for years—since at least 2013, when the actor was photographed wearing such a beret in Paris, the chapeau’s cultural homeland—and it’s possible that his cap is custom. (New Era sells a similar version for $45 that is currently, and understandably, sold out; the buzzy Queens streetwear label Aimé Leon Dore also released its own wool beret embroidered with a smaller Yankees logo back in 2022.)
But even further back than that, at the 47th Academy Awards in 1975, Nicholson memorably wore a beret and dark aviator sunglasses with his peak-lapeled tuxedo. He was nominated for best actor that year for his role in Roman Polanski’s LA noir Chinatown—his fourth Oscar nomination in half a decade, though he wouldn’t win his first statuette until a year later in 1976, for his turn as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nicholson attended the event with Huston on his arm, and he wore his beret indoors throughout the ceremony.
