Inside SNL50’s Star-Studded Reunion

Ask most anybody who’s ever worked at Saturday Night Live to describe their experience and you’ll hear the most harrowing responses … uttered in the most affectionate tones.

“SNL is built on ADD, procrastination and people who can really focus at the very end of the day — it’s also a psychological torture chamber,” says Dana Carvey, castmember from 1986 to 1993.

Such animated takes aren’t just reserved for the on-air talent. “There’s the very familiar diarrhea cramps of which many have spoken about,” says Paula Pell, a writer from 1995 to 2013. “You get the cortisol back when you’re there, like somebody gave you 18 niacin pills and you’re just flushing in hot panic. But it’s exhilarating.”

The 2024-25 season provided many with the opportunity to relive the blissful burnout associated with NBC’s iconic sketch show, as the 50th anniversary run brought back almost every notable living alum. Nothing epitomized that more than the February primetime special celebrating the milestone, but the reunion started five months earlier — when the final days of the 2024 presidential election called on several familiar faces to portray the main players. As with almost everything at SNL, that came together after a few calls from executive producer Lorne Michaels last summer.

“Lorne called before that crazy debate and said, ‘You’ll come out, it’ll be New York in the fall, you’ll do six shows, and then, if that’s all you want, you can tell us to fuck off,’ ” says Carvey, incapable of quoting his old boss without slipping into a dead-on impersonation. Before he signed on, the comic made sure that nobody on the current payroll wanted the part. Writer and producer Steve Higgins asked around for Carvey, even checking with past Biden impersonator Mikey Day. Nobody bit.

Then came Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, which prompted the 46th president to abandon the race and endorse Kamala Harris. Carvey assumed his gig had gone the way of Biden’s hopes for a second term when, in reality, the historic circumstances just made the performance that much more tricky. “There were so many sensitivities,” he says, “and if you ding Biden, you’re making Trump happy.”

For Maya Rudolph, this was not her first rodeo. The 2000-2007 castmember began sporadically guesting as the former vice president in 2019. But the pressure on the actress was similar to Carvey’s. With the highest-stakes election of her lifetime on the line, Rudolph wanted a funny parody — and a flattering one. “I wanted her to feel good about it,” says Rudolph, who’d previously gotten positive feedback from the onetime California senator. “I also wanted her to win, so I did everything in my power to try to do that — to make what I felt was my contribution to being on the right side of history.”

Harris was said to be happy with Rudolph’s performance, so much so that she agreed to a very last-minute, surprise cameo during the final episode before the election. With five campaign stops in Pennsylvania earlier that day, Harris didn’t have time to attend rehearsal. So, when that cold open saw Rudolph, in character, leave fellow alum Andy Samberg (on hand to play Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff) and greet the real Harris on the other side of a dummy vanity mirror, it came as a genuine shock for viewers. Both Rudolph and Michaels have said they’ve never heard a bigger gasp from an SNL audience.

“Introducing her, watching her enjoyment looking at Wally [Feresten] holding cue cards and getting to say ‘Live From New York’ for the first time, I just thought, ‘Wow, I wish my mom could see this,’ ” says Rudolph. “There was a beautiful little bubble around the studio. There was a shine to that night.”

Trump trounced Harris that Tuesday. Rudolph moved on. Carvey, who had one more Biden and a brief stab at Elon Musk in him, stuck around for three more episodes. And Streeter Seidell, one of SNL‘s three head writers, found himself leaning more and more on castmember James Austin Johnson, the show’s de facto Trump since Alec Baldwin hung up his orange wig.

“The cold opens were a challenge because I’m not necessarily a politically minded comedy writer, but it was a super fun — and stressful, especially during the election,” said Seidell. “The latter half of the season, it was a lot of James basically doing stand-up as Trump.”

Political comedy tends to serve SNL well. Average ratings for the 50th season hit 8.1 million viewers, a three-year high. The tally doesn’t include the reunion special that reached 15 million. The event that Tina Fey likened to “the best cousins reunion” brought back five decades’ worth of alums (cast and writers) for more than three hours of nostalgia, new material and the highest concentration of talent Studio 8H has ever seen.

“It was absolutely unreal,” says Ego Nwodim, a castmember since 2018. “To be in the company of so many performers I grew up watching and admiring, seeing Eddie Murphy as funny as he’s ever been, in my mind, I was like, ‘This should be illegal.’ “

For many at the show, it was a weekend of dream casting. Day, on SNL since 2013, recalls being largely on the sidelines for the 40th anniversary; this time, he got to work with Meryl Streep, who has been on his “dream host list forever.”

As he and Seidell tell it, Kate McKinnon (2012 to 2022) first thought of casting Streep as the mother of Colleen Rafferty — the woman who recounts her obscene alien abductions. Michaels made the initial call, naturally, and McKinnon and Streep began texting ideas. “In our head, Meryl was just going to do a version of Kate, but she really put her own spin on it,” says Day. Adds Seidell: “Giving her a script with the words ‘cooter’ and ‘tooter’ in it was in itself an experience to remember. What’s more remarkable is that it was the first thing she’s ever done on the show.”

Wish fulfillment extended beyond current staff. Pell came back with hopes of revisiting two of her favorite creations. Marty and Bobbi, the awkward music teachers played by Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer, appeared during the SNL50: The Homecoming Concert just two nights before the anniversary. Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer, star of one of the most memorable bits in SNL history for its track record of causing so many to break character, made it to the main stage — with another notable cameo. “I can now die knowing that I got Robert De Niro in a Debbie Downer sketch, staring into the camera during the ‘womp womp,’ ” says Pell. “Just put me in the dirt.”

Rudolph was desperate to introduce the Bronx Beat ladies to Linda Richmond from “Coffee Talk” that would involve her collaborating with one of her comedy heroes. “I’ve never had the chance to express to Mike Myers [1989 to 1995] how much he means to me, how in love I am with him as a performer,” she says. “That he wanted to do that with characters that Amy Poehler and I created was truly my fantasy football … I guess? I don’t know how fantasy football works.”

The special may have felt like a punctuation mark on the season, but there were still eight more episodes and a barrage of absurdities to lampoon courtesy of the new administration. If there was a highlight for the staff, it was arguably Nwodim’s Miss Eggy.

In the wake of news that the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was capitulating to the new regime and nixing its traditional roast, Nwodim used the show to pitch an alternative. She and writers Josh Patten, Carl Tart, Asha Ward and Will Stephen created a comedian of their own. They’d pay homage to the Black female stand-ups of the 1990s, only to have the entire set revolve around the frustration of Nwodim’s alter ego with the WHCD food.

She roasted the menu during her own “Weekend Update” segment on the April 5 episode. During a call-and-response with the audience, which colleague Bowen Yang dubbed his “favorite televised moment ever,” Nwodim accidentally inspired the crowd to drop a few four-letter words that weren’t censored during the live telecast. Headlines about FCC fines, exaggerated by Colin Jost, followed. That did not stop her from a reprise performance for the May 17 season finale.

“She’s sort of primed for encore performances,” says Nwodim, who just may have come up with a character to be revisited in a future SNL anniversary. “And I was not fined by the FCC. That was, in fact, a bit.”