The stacked cast of “Saturday Night” includes Dylan O’Brien, Lamorne Morris, Gabriel Labelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith and Ella Hunt. Watch them sit down with CinemaBlend’s Managing Editor Sean O’Connell to discuss topics such as their “Saturday Night Live” heroes, making out during “Step Brothers,” and of course, Lorne Michaels’ craziest real-life stories.
00:02I made out for the first time on a couch to Step Brothers 1.
00:05Yeah.
00:05Second time saying that today, and I hope I get a third.
00:13Obviously, the Saturn Live has been influential for decades.
00:16Is there a performer that you can point to and say,
00:19that person impacted the way that I perform or the way that I view comedy?
00:23Eddie Murphy.
00:24Yeah, Eddie Murphy.
00:25Eddie Murphy is the king.
00:27There was a while where I was obsessed with him.
00:32I was just so fascinated with everything that he did.
00:35Nutty Professor is one of my favorite movies.
00:37I mean, the guy plays seven characters, you know.
00:40Coming to America, he's playing 100 characters.
00:43The ability to do something like that, the stamina to do something like that.
00:47A film day is difficult.
00:49To go through all that and then create a completely different character for the same scene is genius.
00:54And his origin was Saturday Night Live.
00:57And it's a great training ground for some of the greatest entertainers that we've ever seen.
01:02And I think Eddie Murphy is at the top of that list.
01:05God, I mean, there's been so many guys.
01:08Like, I really loved Will Ferrell when I was a kid.
01:11You know, I don't know how much it impacted Mayor.
01:14I'm kind of like Ferrell, right?
01:16You're exactly like Will.
01:17They say, Will, Dylan.
01:19Well, Dylan, sorry.
01:20The next Ferrell.
01:21Yeah.
01:21Wait, you're not?
01:22Did you think I was in Brazil?
01:23You're not, Will Ferrell?
01:24Totally different guy.
01:25Whoa.
01:25Oh my god.
01:26Totally different guy.
01:29Wow.
01:29Corey, selfishly, I just want you to keep playing Chevy.
01:32I think you're so amazing at Chevy in that time period.
01:35Sorry.
01:35Tripped over my penis.
01:36If you could keep the performance going and do one of his early roles, which would you remake right now?
01:43Oh, that's a great question.
01:45You know, his very first feature was Foul Play with Goldie Hawn.
01:49So cool.
01:50And it's a great movie.
01:51I don't know that I'd want to remake it.
01:53It's a pleasure.
01:55But it's really interesting.
01:57You know, as I was like studying him and who he was, one of the things that I had to really look for and pay attention to was who is the Chevy that's performing and who is the Chevy off screen.
02:09And I was always looking for moments of like nervousness or vulnerability, most of which I would find in interviews.
02:16But I did notice, you know, there's a different quality of him in Foul Play than other films.
02:22It's his first feature.
02:24And you can sort of feel him exploring and figuring stuff out.
02:29You know, it's like he's not doing sketch comedy.
02:32He's doing like a proper Hollywood film with a star, with Goldie Hawn.
02:36And I do see moments in like flex in that performance of like, oh, that's an actor doing his first feature.
02:46I can see that.
02:47And I kind of love that, you know.
02:49I mean, more than 90 minutes of live television by a group of 20 year olds who have never made anything.
02:54Okay, so this is a bit.
02:56Look, I don't get half the shit that they do.
02:57I go down these weird rabbit holes of people telling Lorne Michaels stories.
03:05I'm curious, what's the greatest one that you heard in your preparation leading up to this?
03:10I think, I think, man, I love, I think one that's the most charming is how he and his writing partner,
03:20Hart Pomerantz, had their own CBC radio show when they were in college.
03:25And that's how they, and they really satirized.
03:29And you can really see the formation of Saturday Night Live and Lorne's sensibility, his sense of humor,
03:34his writing style, and how he'd kind of been building up to the show for so long.
03:39And he wanted to take down the Canadian government and satirize them as he would the American government on SNL.
03:47But it's a Canadian government run company.
03:52So they were totally censored.
03:55And that was the beginning of a long battle with censorship his entire career.
04:01Rachel, you're obviously extremely gifted both as a writer and a performer.
04:04If you were given the chance to do one of them for the course of a season,
04:08would you want to write or would you want to perform on the show?
04:10Ooh.
04:11Cool.
04:12That's a great question.
04:13Honestly, I think it would be really cool to write.
04:18Because I went in the writer's room and, like, I was there for the Ryan Gosling episode this past spring, I guess.
04:27And I was in there when the Beavis and Butthead sketch played.
04:31You're talking about me?
04:32And everyone was like, yeah, that's really good.
04:35Like, it was cool to see all the people, like, responsible for the sketch.
04:40So I think it would be really fun to write.
04:42Ella, the line that sticks with me is, do you ever have nostalgia for a moment that you're still in?
04:47Right?
04:47That scene we shot on our first night of shooting.
04:53We were actually at Rockefeller Ice Wing.
04:57I'm a New Yorker.
04:59So to shoot a scene playing Gilda Radner, directed by one of my favorite directors ever,
05:07saying these words about having nostalgia for a moment while you're still in it.
05:13Talk about, like, uncanny, like, meta experience.
05:20Like, dream within a dream.
05:21I felt all those things that Gilda was saying.
05:25And, God, what a privilege to get to say them.
05:29And, weirdly, I ended up saying them to Jason.
05:33Jason, that night, we shot Matt playing Belushi, who is just extraordinary in this movie.
05:40I can't even.
05:42We shot Matt on the ice first.
05:44And thank God we got a lot of the scene from his perspective before he fell.
05:51He fell and he hit his head.
05:53And then we were like, we have to keep shooting.
05:57He went to the hospital.
06:00Jason put on skates and did the scene with me.
06:05Get out of here.
06:06Yeah.
06:07Yeah.
06:07First night of shooting was wild.
06:10Gabriel, if you could continue to play Lorne and keep this exact same ensemble,
06:14but tackle a different era of SNL, which one would you do?
06:17I think, you know what, the funniest idea that I've heard was Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Feldman
06:25would always joke, because when Lorne left after the first five seasons, Dick Ebersole
06:31was running it, and Neil Levy, Lorne's cousin, was running it as well.
06:37And it was just those two.
06:38And I think it would be really funny to see those guys carry on the story.
06:44I think there's really something to that, actually.
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