See the Saturday Night Cast vs. the Real Original Stars of Saturday Night Live

The original cast of Saturday Night Live may have not been ready for prime time when the sketch comedy series premiered in 1975, but director Jason Reitman felt it was high time they got their own film chronicling their efforts.

Saturday Night—starring a vast ensemble of actors playing Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and more comedians on the brink of mega fame—opens in wide release Oct. 11, the 49th anniversary of the premiere of SNL, which is now in its 50th season. (The math works: If you just celebrated your 49th birthday, you are also in your 50th season.)

While SNL is a cultural institution now, the up-and-comers who got it off the ground weren't concerned "one way or another" with its long-term impact, according to Chase, who was only a full-time cast member for that first season.

"We were going to do what we do, and if you laugh, great, you laugh," the National Lampoon's Vacation star recently told the New York Times. "You'll tell somebody else about it, and they’ll laugh the next time."

Which basically is how sketches go viral these days, too, only now we've got the Internet.

Saturday Night takes creative license with just how much drama was crammed into the 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever episode of what was then called NBC's Saturday Night (ABC launched Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell on Sept. 20, 1975; it only lasted one season, freeing star Bill Murray to join the NBC show), but the cinematic action is rooted in real events.

"[Co-writer] Gil Kenan and I started interviewing everyone we could find, every living person who was in the building on Oct. 11, 1975, and, and we were not short on anecdotal plot," Reitman told The Ankler's Richard Rushfield ahead of the film's premiere. "The amount of stories around this show coming together at the last second were all exciting, surprising, funny, and they all fell into the category of, 'You'd never believe what happened that time.'"

Enlisted to make it all believable are a range of ready-for-the-big-screen players, from Gabriel LaBelle as SNL creator Michaels and Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd to Matthew Rhys as first-ever host George Carlin and Kaia Gerber as Chase's girlfriend Jacqueline Carlin (no relation). 

So without any further adieu, live from right here, it's the cast of Saturday Night vs. the real-life original stars of SNL they're portraying:

Toronto native Lorne Michaels was only 30 when he ushered Saturday Night Live to air from Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Minus a break from 1980 until 1985, he's been the show's executive producer and all-seeing-and-knowing mastermind ever since.

SNL was embarking on its 27th season when Gabriel LaBelle—who played an inspired-by-Steven Spielberg teen in the director's semi-autobiographical 2022 film The Fabelmans—was born in Vancouver in 2002. But he still "totally grew up on it," even though he didn't know who Michaels was until he went down a YouTube rabbit hole.

"It kept coming up, people kept talking about Lorne or the stories or how they got hired on SNL, or how they learned their most important lessons, or their impressions of him," LaBelle told IndieWire. "So it was definitely, I think, high school-ish, maybe even the pandemic. That’s probably why I had so much time to just sit around and watch YouTube all day."

He watched tons of interviews but didn't meet Michaels before taking on the role. In his research, "I focused on how he got to that place in his life," LaBelle said, "how he accumulated those talented people he was going to be working alongside, and what he’d done in his professional career to get to that point of power."

While Michaels is credited as SNL's sole creator, his first wife, Rosie Shuster, was instrumental in getting it off the ground and she shared a 1976 Emmy win for writing with her then-husband and others for a first-season episode hosted by Elliott Gould. 

Played by The Idol alum Rachel Sennott (also a star of Bodies Bodies Bodies with modern-day SNL star Pete Davidson) in Saturday Night, Shuster was in an extramarital entanglement with O.G. SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd when the show premiered. Aykroyd, meanwhile, was seeing castmate Laraine Newman and had previously dated Gilda Radner. ("I was talking to Dan’s daughters," director Jason Reitman told The Hollywood Reporter, "and we were joking, actually, about the amount of women that Dan slept with at SNL.")

None of which was a secret, with director John Landis recalling in the 2002 oral history Live From New York how John Belushi introduced him to Shuster as "'Lorne's wife and Danny's girlfriend.' Which is true. It was wild."

Shuster and Michaels divorced in 1980 but she remained involved with SNL until 1988.

Sennott said it was "so amazing" to get to speak to Shuster on the phone because, she told Rotten Tomatoes, the comedy writer was "such a key part in the creation of SNL...and not as many people know about her, so I'm very excited to share her story."

Or as the actress put it to Variety: "She's so f--king cool under pressure. I am not like that at all."

Gilda Radner was the first of the seven O.G. stars known as the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" to be cast on what started as NBC's Saturday Night—so named because ABC's Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell featured a rotating cast dubbed the "Prime Time Players." 

She got on Michaels' radar after her professional acting debut in a 1972 production of Godspell in Canada (her costars included Martin Short and Eugene Levy, with Paul Shaffer as musical director), after which she joined the Toronto branch of famed Chicago comedy troupe Second City. "

"I always feel like I was found, more than I went out and sought my career," she said on WPBA-Atlanta's Cinema Showcase in 1986.

And what the first cast of SNL really had going for it, Radner noted, was that "there was no one to compare us to. The show wasn't famous, we weren't anybody and we weren't that good, not in the first couple years. We learned how to do it."

Radner divorced first husband G.E. Smith (of "and the Saturday Night Live Band" fame) in 1982 after two years together. She married Gene Wilder in 1984 and remained with him until her death at 42 from ovarian cancer in 1989.

Ella Hunt "had a wonderful four months" preparing to play the comedy legend, she told Fox News Digital. "Sat at home with my cats watching funny videos of Gilda and trying to copy her, channel some of the spirit. I had wonderful conversations with friends of hers...and just tried to get silly, you know?"

Michaels initially invited Chevy Chase onboard as a writer—an offer the aspiring performer, who had been writing for the Smothers Brothers Show, refused but quickly reconsidered.

The debut "Weekend Update" host became SNL's first breakout star, leaving after one season to make movies, starting with 1978's Foul Play opposite Goldie Hawn. But he really hit his comedic stride in the 1980s when he cranked out, to name some, Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation, Fletch, Spies Like Us, ¡Three Amigos! and Funny Farm.

When SNL premiered, "We were all prepared—at least I was, and Lorne was prepared for how it would go," Chase recalled to the New York Times in 2024. "There was no way we were going to do a show without running it over a few times."

To play the prickly-by-reputation Chase, Cory Michael Smith looked to the star's first post-SNL movie to start peeling the onion.

"As I was 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? And I was always looking for moments of nervousness, or vulnerability, most of which I would find in interviews," Smith told CinemaBlend. "But I did notice there's a different quality of him in Foul Play than other films. It's his first feature, and you can sort of feel him exploring and figuring stuff out."

Dan Aykroyd was on the short-lived Canadian series The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour with Michaels as a teenager, after which he performed with Second City in Toronto before he auditioned for SNL.

"I went through so many auditions," he recalled in Live From New York. Sure he didn't get it, he drove from Toronto to Pasadena, Calif., to do Second City. He'd been there for a week when Michaels beckoned him back to New York. Seeing a massive crowd of hopefuls, Aykroyd said, he cut the line "and busted into the room—because I knew Lorne from Canada—and walked up."

Aykroyd stayed for four seasons before movies—The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Ghostbusters, to name a few—came calling.

Playing Aykroyd was "open to interpretation," Dylan O'Brien told Men's Health, explaining that Reitman "really wanted everyone to have their own spin on the person, which, if you're overthinking it, can be tough to do because it can be very easy to do. If you're like, I’m just going to watch my guy’s interviews and sketches, then you can kind of fall into imitation. As far as I know, I was just doing what I thought he was like." 

O'Brien added, "He's so precise with his improvisation and his comedic skills. I came away with such a larger appreciation than I even had for his genius."

Reitman did want the actor to capture Aykroyd's "very unique sex appeal," as the director put it to THR.

Jane Curtin, a veteran of commercials and the Boston improv group The Proposition, nailed her audition for SNL in 1975. But she was admittedly not sure how to promote herself once she was there.

"I was quiet and nobody paid any attention to me," the 30 Rock From the Sun alum told the NY Times. "I didn’t know how to pitch. I had never had to do that in my life." But, she continued, "I figured, well, they hired me. They're paying me. So it would be foolish of them not to use me."

Kim Matula certainly took notice, the Bold and the Beautiful actress telling SoapHub that she only did "a little bit of research" because she was so familiar with Curtin's SNL work already.

"And I had seen Jane Curtin's sketch [from the premiere], so I knew immediately like, 'I know how Jane delivers this,'" Matula said. "And I felt, like, so excited to bring that out."

What separated Curtin from the pack, she continued, was that "Jane is the straight man, and she knows it. You can’t have a clown without a straight man. Someone has to be there to set up those moments, and if it wasn’t for her, then those moments wouldn't exist."

Incidentally, Curtin was the cast member NBC sent out to do press in the weeks leading up to the premiere. "I was the only one they weren't afraid of," she recalled in Live From New York. "They knew I wouldn't throw my food."

She and Aykroyd brought their SNL-born Conehead characters to the big screen in a 1993 film produced by Michaels.

Laraine Newman, most recently of critiquing-The Bear fame and mom of Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, was a founding member of L.A.-based improv troupe The Groundlings before Michaels recruited her for SNL.

"It was going to be a cross between 60 Minutes, and Monty Python," Newman said, recalling Michaels' pitch to the New York Times. "I did not know who Monty Python was. I knew that I trusted Lorne."

Going into that first show, "We were made aware that it was a graveyard shift and that this was a new thing, and it would be surprising if anybody was watching us," she said. "So we really felt kind of unobserved."

After watching Saturday Night, Newman posted on X that she was honored to have "this brilliant actor" play her. (Fairn, who hails from Liverpool, is making her American film debut.)

"I've kept silent after seeing the SNL movie because honestly, I don't know how to express my feelings on it," Newman continued. "I can say it's thoroughly entertaining-heart pounding- brilliantly written, directed and the actors are all superb."

"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," director Reitman told The Hollywood Reporter of casting the relative newcomer—who was previously on Broadway in the SpongeBob SquarePants musical—in his first major studio film.

"John was round but athletic and shockingly spry, so part of the trick to him is being able to [make] those quick, convulsive moments," Reitman explained. “Matt was able to do that right from the get-go. That, more than anything, gave us confidence."

Belushi—the man, the myth, the legend who inspired Chris Farley—knew Aykroyd from Second City, but it was Chase and SNL's first head writer Michael O'Donoghue who recommended the boisterous performer to Michaels.

While on SNL he played rambunctious frat boy Bluto in the 1978 classic Animal House and costarred in The Blues Brothers with Aykroyd before dying of an accidental drug overdose in 1982 when he was only 33.

Juilliard-trained Garrett Morris was working as a school teacher when he was hired to be a writer on SNL and then was asked to try out for the cast.

His audition "was Gilda and me," he told THR in 2021. "Lorne assigned us a scene: I was a cab driver bringing in a visitor to the city. Gilda was the visitor, and I was the cab driver, and I cheated the s--t out of her. And they laughed...Gilda's range was just immense. I was counterpunching in this whole thing, but it got me over. After that, Lorne said, 'You're hired."

Since his five turbulent seasons on SNL ("I take credit for creating a lot of enemies"), he has been in dozens of films and TV shows, everything from Murder, She Wrote and The Love Boat, to Martin and ER, to 2 Broke Girls and How I Met Your Father.

Even before speaking to the SNL O.G. about his experience, Lamorne Morris went in knowing that "the backdrop was Garrett was the only Black dude on the show," the actor told THR in September. "And a lot of the writers were racist, and the jokes were a certain type of way he wasn't necessarily comfortable with."

The New Girl star also related to the elder performer ("I used to tell people that he was my dad, as a joke") because he had "a very similar walk in my career," he said. "I was always called, 'the Black dude from that show.'"

Lamorne—who won an Emmy for Fargo in September—teamed with SNL alum Leslie Jones to present Garrett with the Hollywood Legacy Award at the 2024 American Black Film Festival Honors.

All brands of comedy were on hand from day one, with the SNL premiere featuring the oft-confounding Andy Kaufman, pre-Taxi fame. (He auditioned for the cast but didn't make it.)

Jim Henson was behind the adult-puppet segments "The Land of Gorch" during SNL's first season, after which he got busy making The Muppet Show over on ABC starting in 1976.

The late visionary was only 6-foot-3, but the Henson role was written with 6-foot-7 Succession alum Nicholas Braun in mind. Benny Safdie, a major Kaufman fan, was going to play the comedian, but he had to drop out and director Reitman asked Braun to pull double duty a few weeks before filming started in Atlanta.

Wanting to nail both, Braun watched as many interviews as possible, noting there weren't as many of Kaufman, who died of lung cancer at 35.

Henson had "lower energy," Braun told Vanity Fair, "despite what he does and the puppets having all sorts of energy." Kaufman, meanwhile, was "this total mystery of a guy" making his first-ever TV appearance.

"So to know that he came in with that kind of energy and committed to his bit like he always did," Braun said, "he never broke when he was doing one of his acts."

Dick Ebersol joined NBC as Director of Weekend Late Night Programming in 1974 and was tasked with finding a show to re-fill the Saturday slot occupied by reruns of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

During his scouring of the U.S. and Canada for talent, he liked Michaels but not his Kentucky Fried Theater-inspired pitch. Ebersol was hoping to get Richard Pryor onboard, but when that fell through he went to NBC and said he'd found the right producer.

Over the course of nine or 10 days, Ebersol recalled in the 2002 SNL oral history Live From New York, "we worked out a loose thing of what this was going to be...a reperatory company of seven, and a writing staff and fake commercials and all that."

Ebersol was executive producer of SNL during the five years Michaels took off in the 1980s and then left NBC for a few years, returning in 1989 and serving as president of NBC Sports until 2011.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's son Cooper Hoffman, who made his acting debut in 2021's Licorice Pizza (directed by Maya Rudolph's partner, Paul Thomas Anderson), takes on the role of the SNL champion who frequently butted heads with its creator.

"I just think that Dick loves the show and loves Lorne," Hoffman said during a Sept. 30 panel conversation," and I think it's really hard to love somebody when they're actively fighting against you. And that's kind of what I did the entire time. Of like, no matter what he would do to me, I would love him." 

George Carlin was the first-ever host of SNL, and he really did just that, introducing the show and performing stand-up but not appearing in any bits.

"He was in between ages," daughter Kelly Carlin told the NY Times of her pioneering father, who by the time SNL premiered had already made legal history with his "seven dirty words" routine (ultimately deemed not obscene by the U.S. Supreme Court). "In the '60s, he knew he was entertaining the parents of the people he actually related to. In 1975 he would have been 38, when being 30 was considered the enemy. And yet he completely understood the desire of the cast and the writing staff to stick it to the man."

At first Kelly was unaware that her dad was a character in the film, writing on X in a since-deleted post (per LateNighter), "I find it so strange that this film is about the first taping of SNL and the host that night isn’t in the film. I know he was doing a lot of blow that week, but I do know he showed up to the taping!"

Quickly informed on X by Kumail Nanjiani that Matthew Rhys, an Emmy winner for The Americans, was playing the comedian, who died in 2008, she replied, "Oh! Wow. He is great."

Model-actress Jacqueline Carlin (no relation to the evening's host) was Chevy Chase's fiancée when SNL premiered and became his second wife in 1986. She was on SNL a handful of times between 1975 and 1976, including an uncredited appearance on the first episode.

She and Chase divorced in 1980, after which she married Doris Day's son, record producer Terry Melcher, and the three of them owned the Cypress Inn in Carmel, Calif.

When Carlin died in 2021, she was survived by son Ryan Melcher.

Already a model, Gerber didn't have to transform in that sense, but the 23-year-old did want to brush up on her SNL history. It so happened she was shooting Palm Royale with Kristen Wiig and used the opportunity to pick her brain.

"I would always, in between takes, be like, 'Please tell me all your stories,'" Gerber, who was also happy to be reuniting with her Bottoms costar Sennott, told Entertainment Tonight in March. "I've been a fan of Kristen's, I think her work on that show is brilliant. So, yeah, she gave me some advice and I'm also just very excited to go back to the '70s."

Michael O'Donoghue, a founding writer of the National Lampoon humor magazine, was the first head writer at SNL and he uttered the first words spoken on the show in the premiere's cold open, "The Wolverines," telling John Belushi, "Good evening." (Before saying, "Repeat after me: I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.")

He also threatened to run the show off the rails.

"He would flip out occasionally," former SNL writer Bob Tischler told Cracked in 2022 of O'Donoghue, who died in 1994. “Breaking things, throwing things, screaming. And you just had to stay away from him. Michael had this history with everybody. Anybody who really got close to him ended up being on his enemies list at a certain point."

Garrett Morris called O'Donoghue a "racist motherf--ker" in 2021, telling THR that the late writer, in response to him volunteering to play a doctor in a sketch, told him that "'people would be thrown by a Black doctor.'"

"Because he was associated with National Lampoon," the actor said, "I made some progressive assumptions I shouldn’t have made."

Al Franken appeared on SNL off and on between 1977 and 1995, but he was good enough and smart enough to be one of the show's original writers, sharing a $350-per-week apprentice salary with creative partner Tom Davis, his pal since high school growing up in Minnesota.

He and Davis were the only writers hired by Michaels sight unseen, Franken remembered in Live From New York, adding, "We always thought that if he had met us, we wouldn't have gotten the job."

They weren't joke writers, Franken added, but they submitted "a packet of things we'd like to see on TV—a news parody, commercial parody, and a couple sketches."

When his casting was announced in March, Taylor Gray wrote on Instagram, "Well, here’s to the beginning of my (long) campaign for Senator...stoked to be part of this wild story as the legend Al Franken w my partner [Mcabe Gregg] as Tom Davis #SNL1975."

Of playing a living person still in the public eye, Gray said he'd just have to roll with any critiques of his portrayal.

"You know some people will love it," while others will nitpick, he said on the Asking Hard Questions podcast in June. "The beauty is everyone, and it's so subjective, has their own opinion on it, and that's the fun of it."

Davis and Franken, who shared a writing Emmy with Michaels, Shuster, Chase and others in 1976, helped set the tone for the show early on and appeared initially as a comedy duo when they did get in front of the camera.

Davis wrote for SNL off and on through 2004 but he and Franken (who shared in three more Emmy wins) ended their professional partnership in 1990. (Franken never fails to mention Davis when talk turns to his days on SNL.)

"Certainly, my substance abuse was a huge issue as he went through Al-Anon," Davis, who chronicled his low points in his 2009 book Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, told Roll Magazine at the time. "We broke up in 1990. Al says it was drug use but that’s not what my accountant said."

He wrote lovingly of his days at SNL, warts and all, and Michaels was at his book party.

"I told him I loved him and he said he loved me too," Davis said. "He's the patriarch over there at Saturday Night Live and he's a guy who changed my life and I’m grateful for all of that."

Franken, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2009, delivered a eulogy for Davis from the chamber floor after his death from cancer in 2012 at the age of 59.

Billy Crystal was an up-and-coming New York comedian booked to be on the show's premiere. Later he'd be a marvelous member of the 1984-85 cast, one of the Ebersol-produced seasons, but on Oct. 11, 1975, he was cut for time.

Finding out he was bumped, he was upset, Crystal recalled in Live From New York, but "I didn't want it to look like I was the guy who stormed off the show."

Nicholas Podany auditioned to play Aykroyd, reenacting the famed "Super Bass-o-matic" sketch, then read for the part of Michaels and got a callback—but to try out for Crystal. 

The Hello Tomorrow! alum watched Crystal's hosting monologue from 1980 and, for the first time, When Harry Met Sally.

"I embarrassingly said that before this the only exposure I'd had to him previously was Monsters Inc.," Podany told The Hollywood Reporter about his response to the assumption that he must be a huge Crystal fan due to his spot-on take. To do the entertainer's voice, he explained,  "You take all of the bass-iness out of your voice and just put it in here [pointing to his nose and sinuses], "and put a New York dialect on it.”

Once he was cast, Reitman told him not to do any more research, Podany said, "And then I did every amount of research."

But the moral of the story, he added, was, "I really hope that people watch and recognize to not give up. You get so many nos—and Billy Crystal got this big old fat 'no'—but just keep going."

Billy Preston was the first-ever musical guest on SNL, performing "Nothing From Nothing" after the inaugural sketch and then closing the show with "Fancy Lady."

Preston died in 2006, but the Saturday Night production tried to get as many insider details as possible. "Every living cast member, every living writer, people from the art department, costumes, hair and makeup, NBC pages, members of Billy Preston's band — I mean, anyone we could find," Reitman told THR.

Jon Batiste, who also scored the film (Reitman wanted it to be "almost falling apart and also somehow brilliantly chaotic," the Grammy winner told the Washington Post), was thrilled to play Preston.

"It felt like his spirit was running the entire way through the process," Batiste told Rolling Stone. “I was watching videos of him and thinking about how he led his band."

The SNL premiere had two musical guests, Janis Ian singing "At Seventeen" and "In the Winter" in between Preston's performances.

Ian, who'd been touring, had strep throat and a 104-degree fever that Saturday night, but she remembered being cool as a cucumber before showtime, as were Preston and George Carlin.

"They were all, 'Oh my God, when the red light goes on, don't freak out, that's when you start,'" she told the NY Times in 2024. "We were like, 'Yeah, OK, whatever. Let us do our sound checks and go away.'"

It was just another gig to her at the time, Ian admitted, but SNL "has become so different from anything anyone could remotely have envisioned. Nobody thought anything could last this long. But it's mythic now, and I look very smart."

When they were cast, Naomi McPherson of pop trio MUNA simply posted a cool AF picture of Ian circa 1975.

David Tebet, who died in 2005 at 91, was the NBC talent relations executive responsible for bringing Johnny Carson to the network, no big deal.

And Carson was famously annoyed about a repeat of his late night show airing on Saturdays, hence the search for a replacement.

While Milton Berle didn't necessarily flash anyone in the hours leading up to the premiere of SNL, the veteran NBC host once known as "Mr. Television" did so at least one time before his death at 93 in 2002.

SNL writer Alan Zweibel said in Live From New York that, upon telling Berle when Uncle Miltie hosted SNL in 1979 that he got his start in the business writing penis jokes about him, Berle flashed Zweibel in his dressing room. And then Radner walked in, Zweibel added: "She opens the door to his dressing room just in time to see me looking into his d--k saying, 'Yeah, it's really, really nice.'"

Claim to notoriety aside, J.K. Simmons said it was "inordinately intimidating playing a real person and an iconic guy." But, he told Moviefone, "I learned things about Milton Berle that I didn't know, and they plopped a wig on my head, and I tried to find that sweet spot in between getting a flavor of the guy without trying to do some sort of slavish impersonation."

Saturday Night is in theaters now.

(E! and NBC are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)

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