How Saturday Night Movie Cast Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Other SNL Stars

Gabriel Labelle as Lorne Michaels

“We only talked about a handful, maybe ten or a dozen, Lornes,” says Papsidera, with Reitman adding, “Once you cross out all the ones that are not Jewish and Canadian, you really come down to one guy.” The guy was Gabriel Labelle who broke out playing another entertainment impresario, Steven Spielberg, in The Fabelmans. Michaels was 30 when SNL started, while LaBelle is currently 21, which was a slight concern for filmmakers but not for long. Says Reitman, “I met Gabe standing next to Steven Spielberg, and Gabe held his own standing next to the greatest director alive. That was one of the first moments where I went, ‘Wow, this kid has a presence.’”

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Matt Wood as John Belushi

“Matt Wood is a guy who, probably since a teenager, has been going, ‘God, I really hope they make a John Belushi movie, because I’d be perfect,’” says Reitman of the actor who has an uncanny resemblance to the Blues Brothers star. Interestingly, their choice came from the theater — the original cast of Broadway’s SpongeBob SquarePants musical to be exact. “John was round but athletic and shockingly spry, so part of the trick to him is being able to these, those quick, convulsive moments. Matt was able to do that right from the get-go. That, more than anything, gave us confidence.”

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Corey Michael Smith as Chevy Chase

“There had to be a couple hundred Chevy that we looked at,” says Papsidera. He and the team started auditioning the actors using the skits from the original broadcast of the first SNL episode. But, he says, “In short order, we came to the conclusion we’re not looking what the end product is. What we want is the essence of the beginning, so we pivoted.” Chase’s essence? “It’s the ego that needs to be humbled,” says Reitman. Corey Michael Smith, whose varied credits include Todd Haynes’ May December and DC TV series Gotham, offered more than a spot-on impersonation. Says Reitman, “Corey did the scene great and Corey had the voice down, but he also did an amazing fall right at the beginning of his audition. He did this thing where he stumbled into a trash can.” A similar bit ends the film’s much-watched trailer, with Smith’s Chase, delivering, “Sorry, I tripped over my penis.”

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Kim Matula as Jane Curtin

“What I see in Kim [Matula] is something I see very similarly in Jane, which is: If you’re a beautiful woman often a sense of humor is considered a vestigial limb,” says Reitman. “What made Jane so brilliant on SNL, is she could slip into these Colgate commercials perfectly, except she would do it 2% off, and all of a sudden it was brilliantly funny. Kim had the same thing. You look at Kim and go: I see who you’ve been cast for the last 15 years and now you get to have fun with it.” One of Reitman’s biggest regrets on Saturday Night is not finding a place for a line that Michaels would deliver when Curtin asked why she was cast.  “Lorne was going to say, ‘Jane, you’re the only one who could be funny without making jokes.’”

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Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner

“[She’s] the woman who is there to sacrifice herself to make any person around her feel better,” says Reitman of the Roseanne Roseannadanna actress, who is played onscreen by Ella Hunt. “Who thought Gilda would be a British actress that starred in Dickinson?” questions Papsidera. But Reitman says Hunt exuded empathy and, despite being from the UK, nailed Radner’s unique voice, adding, “She was also able to improvise within the voice, which is really impressive.” As for Hunt, she didn’t think she would get the role, says the filmmaker, “She and Corey both noted that they were surprised because they were both dramatic actors. They both came in thinking that their funny friends were gonna get it.”

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Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd

“It was genuinely scary,” says Reitman of how difficult it was to find the movie’s Aykroyd. Some of that difficulty stemmed from the fact that the director has known Aykroyd for much of his life— his father, Ivan, directed him in the original Ghostbusters while he has worked with him on subsequent films. “Jason knew tiny minutia about Dan having spent so much time with him,” says Papsidera. “It was trying to fill the personal side of what Jason knows about Dan as a human.” For Reitman, the actor would have to nail Aykroyd’s speaking voice, humor, verbosity and, in his words, “very unique sex appeal.” He says, “I was talking to Dan’s daughters and we were joking, actually, about the amount of women that Dan slept with at SNL.” When he came in to audition, Reitman wasn’t familiar with O’Brien’s from his work on Teen Wolf or the Maze Runner films but, “I could tell by the women in John’s office that there was an appreciation of Dylan O’Brien.”

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Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman

Reitman was in London’s SoHo neighborhood filming the last Ghostbusters movie when he ran into actor Lucas Hedges (Reitman directed Hedges in the 2013 drama Labor Day), who invited him to his West End show Brokeback Mountain. During the performance, he was introduced Hedges’ onstage co-star Emily Fairn, thinking, “She’s got some really interesting Lorraine energy.” Newman took to improv during her teens, was the youngest of SNL’s cast, and one of the founding members of the improv troupe The Groundlings. After the play, Reitman headed backstage and was surprised by Fairn’s Liverpool accent. “She’d been in an Oklahoma accent on stage the last two hours,” says Reitman. “I asked Lucas, ‘Can she do…’ And he just goes, ‘She could do anything.’”

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Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris

Garrett Morris, the only Black member of the original SNL cast and slightly older, spends much of Saturday Night trying to find his purpose on the show. Lamorne Morris (no relation) was the first person cast for the movie and Reitman recalls, “My conversations with him about his experience on [long-running Fox TV series] New Girl were really interesting and really informative— the fact that he kind of came into that cast as the only Black actor. We would talk about his experience there, and what it was like for Garrett coming into Saturday Night Live.” For his audition, Lamorne sang a song performed by Garrett, a Julliard-trained actor, in SNL’s first season in a sketch about the “Death Row Follies” where, as an incarcerated person, Garrett sang, “I’m gonna get me a shotgun and kill and the whiteys I see!”

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 Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson/ Andy Kauffman

Jim Henson, whose Muppets appeared on SNL in The Land of Gorch a recurring adult puppetry skit, was written for Braun, whereas Benny Safdie, the actor-director who Papsidera had just cast in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, was set to play beloved experimental comedy, Andy Kaufman. “Safdie is a huge Andy Kaufman fan, and used to do similar Andy Kaufman riffs when he was in college where he did a lot of performances doing mock characters,” says Reitman. But Safdie, who is also producing a doc about Kauffman, had to exit the production when his Dwayne Johnson wrestling movie The Smashing Machine was greenlit by A24. The director asked Braun if he would be willing to try both roles, remembering, “Nick has a way of taking information in, you could see his eyes always processing it in real-time. He was going, [Reitman does an impressive impression of Braun] ‘Oh! Oh… oh.’” The Succession actor agreed but told Reitman later that playing both roles “scared the shit out of him.”

This story appeared in the Sept. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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