During the Emmy telecast — before the award for supporting actor in a limited series was announced— Lamorne Morris kept getting text messages from friends. The actor, best known for New Girl and most recently for his turn on the fifth season of Fargo, also is the face of BMO Bank, and his 30-second spot was playing nearly every commercial break. “I’ve been doing those for six or seven years, but people in L.A. are just now getting wind of it,” Morris says with a laugh. “Everyone was like, ‘This must be a sign.’ And it turns out it was.”
Morris, 41, took home his first gold statuette that night for his role on Fargo, a moment that he says gives him immense pride (when prompted, he quickly produces — with a giant grin — the Emmy trophy on the Zoom screen in his home office) but won’t change the way he approaches his career. “I’ve sort of been waiting to see if I’ll feel different, but I don’t think that moment will come,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for so long, so it feels like a sign that I’m on the right track. Plus, I’m a single dad, so I’m not taking the day off after an Emmy win. And my friends and family keep me levelheaded — my sister always tells me any time I have an accomplishment, ‘You ain’t shit.’ ”
Now the actor is looking to his next projects — as SNL castmember Garrett Morris (no relation) in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (in theaters Oct. 9) and on the live-action Marvel series Spider-Noir, on which he just started work portraying Peter Parker pal Robbie Robertson — and finding a way, someday, to land the one gig that still remains No. 1 on his career bucket list: hosting SNL.
An Emmy doesn’t change your life overnight, but has anything in your career done that?
New Girl. I’d had some success, I was a host on BET for a little bit. Then I moved to L.A., went broke and didn’t have it together. But getting New Girl, immediately I thought, “Well, all I’ve got to do is not fuck this up and let Zooey Deschanel do the rest. I remember Fox had all these events they’d take us to for the show, and there’d be 1,000 fans outside, and I just thought, “Wow.” I had to move differently after that. I had to literally change my phone number. I still felt like the same person inside, but I had to shift my behavior a little bit.
I think losing one’s hometown area code would feel monumental …
Oh man, I still miss that phone number. It was so cheesy because it was 708-2287, but if you dial 2287, it spells “actr.”
You say your sister is the one who keeps you the most levelheaded. What is your mom’s take on your success?
A victory for me is a victory for her. She also loved going to the Emmy’s, she’s really funny and charismatic so she loves all the people talking to her. At one point there was a strap that came undone on the back of her dress and Jon Hamm and his wife were helping her fix it. She just kept bragging, Jon Hamm is fixing my dress.
Did she always understand your desire to go into acting?
She saw before I did that I should be on that path. I would say she encouraged a creative profession moreso than other professions that folks would consider “noble,” like a doctor or a lawyer. She always encouraged me, even when I tried to quit the business. I was so broke and stressed out at one point that I thought, LA is not for me, I’m going to go back to Chicago and teach improv. She sent me all the money she had in her savings account, which wasn’t a ton of money, and said, pay your rent and figure it out. You’re not quitting.
What did ‘figuring it out’ look like at that time? What got you out of that position?
I think booking what was my first national commercial. It was for Edge Active Care shaving cream, where I’m talking and a woman just starts rubbing my face, and I then get nervous about how smooth my skin feels. That was my first introduction to the national stage, and then you start to build a rapport with casting directors.
What’s your comfort level with the day-to-day elements of fame, like getting stopped by fans?
I get recognized basically every day. Some people avoid it, but I like being out, and I’ve come a long way and it’s the fans who put me in this position of success so I embrace it. Most of the time it’s New Girl-related, so I’ll get something like “Winnie the Bish!” or “I have a cat!” People love to talk to me about their pets. Lately I’ve been getting, “Yo, Keith!” which is a character I played on a show called Woke. Or now Deputy Witt Farr. They call me everything but my own name.
Lamorne Morris as SNL castmember Garrett Morris in the Jason Reitman-directed Saturday Night, which opens Oct. 9.
In the post-Emmys analysis, I saw a lot of talk of your work on New Girl being “underappreciated.” Do you feel that way?
Well the show got a lot of love, but it also got more love after it was done airing and we were on Netflix. It feels like people are appreciating it on a completely different level than before, and there’s a new generation of people who are discovering it. I still get asked all the time, when’s the new season coming out? People don’t realize we’ve been off the air for years. There will be no next season unless Jake Johnson decides that he wants there to be one. Jake is our holdout. Everybody else so far is down to do it. Hopefully Liz Meriweather is writing right now. But it’d have to be sans Jake Johnson, I don’t think he’s going to do it.
Is he anxious about a revival?
No, he’s too expensive. His whole thing is, I gots to get paid. And we’re like, Jake, please just do it for the fans. And he’s like nope, I gots to get paid. Hopefully he changes his mind.
What do you think is more likely to happen: Game Night 2 or a New Girl reunion?
I think probably Game Night 2. You’ve got to talk to the powers that be about Game Night, but listen, I want to do it. I can speak for all the actors, they want to do it. Well, I can’t speak for Jason Bateman. Or Rachel McAdams or Sharon Horgan. But I can speak for Billy Magnussen — he wants to do it.
Can you talk about the decision to thank Billy in your Emmy’s speech?
He’s been one of my biggest supporters. We talk about everything, we share everything about our careers. We share how much money we make, which is sort of taboo in this business, but we use it to help each other grow and build. He also was there for me when I was shooting Fargo, there were some ups and downs with the show and he would coach me through things and he even came to visit me on set.
I’m surprised that even with the process of the strike, topics like salary haven’t become more open among actors.
I wish it wasn’t. We all work for money, you know? I wish we could have more honesty because I think that would make everything less messy and stressful. Negotiation time can be really difficult because we’re putting a monetary value on what I’m doing and that can lead to resentment of the people you’re working with and working for. But if we all spoke to each other and heard the lead actor is getting 100 bucks and I’m only getting 10 — I don’t need to make 100, but get me a little closer. Disparity can be crazy on sets. And there’s also jealousy and envy and all those things you want to avoid, so I don’t know how we would go about it. But you hear Robert Downey Jr.’s getting X amount of dollars for Dr. Doom, then the other actors in that universe know what’s possible.
You sing in Saturday Night, which felt like a new side for you. Were you nervous?
Sort of. I am far removed from my days of choir and musical theater. But if you watch Garrett Morris sing on the show, he was having fun with it. He wasn’t doing his operatic thing. So that’s less pressure. But Jason [Reitman], this asshole, let me tell you what he did. Right before we’re about to film that scene, he gathers everyone around, all the other actors, so that they were all watching me as I had to sing. But it worked out in the end.
Have you ever been to a real-life taping of Saturday Night Live?
Years ago, when Zooey hosted, we all went to show support. I wanted to be on the show. I auditioned years ago, I sent in a tape, and they asked me to resend it with a few more political impressions. I’m not really a politics guy. I was like, Obama, I guess? I don’t think I even did the impression in the end. But then I booked New Girl that same year, so things worked out. I do think hosting the show would be the biggest thing that could happen to me. Maybe I could just walk into 30 Rock and talk to one of the security guards, brother to brother. I have very kind eyes, so I think they would let me go in and just kick it in the back of the studio.
What else is on your career bucket list?
It used to be to become part of the Marvel Universe. It looks like they’re having a blast and I always want to have a good time on set. Now I’m about to start Spider Noir with Nick Cage and Brandon Gleason, which is really cool. But I do want to be a superhero and we’ll see if the show allows for that. Or sharing a screen with Eddie Murphy.
A version of this story appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
