Introducing the SNL 1975 Cast and Their Real-Life Counterparts
Nearly 50 years into its reign on NBC, Saturday Night Live is going back to the beginning. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jason Reitman will direct and produce SNL 1975, a film about the sketch series’ origins that goes behind the scenes of the famed Studio 8H. Written by Reitman and his Ghostbusters: Afterlife collaborator Gil Kenan, the film is reportedly based on “extensive series of interviews conducted by Reitman and Kenan with all the living cast, writers, and crew,” about SNL’s first broadcast on October 11, 1975. The project, which began production this week, will feature portrayals of all the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, from Chevy Chase to Gilda Radner, as well as Lorne Michaels, the comedic messiah who cast them. Meet the fresh-faced cast bringing television’s trailblazers to life.
From Getty Images.Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels
After earning a Critics Choice Award for his performance as young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, the 21-year-old actor will assume the role of the venerable Saturday Night Live creator at the start of his five-decade tenure with the series. Michaels, who last year became the most-nominated person in Emmy history with 102 career nods, makes rare appearances on SNL—and has even inspired some of his proteges’ fictional characters, including Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil in Austin Powers and Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) in Tina Fey’s 30 Rock.
From Getty Images.Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol
Star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, and son of the late Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, 20-year-old Cooper will play Ebersol, one of the NBC late-night executives instrumental in SNL’s creation. He’d later recount many of his experiences with the long-running series and eventual success with NBC’s Sunday Night Football in his 2022 memoir, From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears, and Touchdowns in TV.
Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster
After a breakout year with Bottoms and Bodies Bodies Bodies, Sennott has been cast as Shuster, one of SNL’s original writers, who also happened to be Michaels’s first wife. During her initial five-year run with the show, Shuster helped conceive some of Radner’s most beloved characters, from Roseanne Roseannadanna to Baba Wawa (a play on Barbara Walters). Although Michaels and Shuster divorced in 1980, Shuster continued sporadically contributing to SNL throughout that decade, perhaps most famously on Dana Carvey’s early Church Lady sketches.
From Getty Images.Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd
After breaking out with roles on Teen Wolf and The Maze Runner, O’Brien went on to star in projects ranging from Taylor Swift’s All Too Well short film to the recent Sundance film Ponyboi. He’s been enlisted to portray Aykroyd, who after three seasons with the comedy program moved on to movies including Ghostbusters, Trading Places, The Blues Brothers, and his Oscar-nominated performance in Driving Miss Daisy.
From Getty Images.Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris
Before his current gig on the fifth season of FX’s Fargo, Morris endeared himself to audiences in the Fox sitcom New Girl and shorter-lived Hulu comedy Woke. The elder Morris, who was the first Black cast member on SNL (and has no relation to Lamorne), originally applied as a writer before spending five seasons onscreen. Post-show, he became a regular presence on Martin and The Jamie Foxx Show, settling into more recent roles on 2 Broke Girls and This Is Us. In a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Morris detailed some of the racism he experienced while on SNL, but maintained that the show itself was a “radical idea in ’75” because “everybody was made to understand that anybody can be the butt of the joke.”
From Getty Images.Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner
Best known for her performances in the Apple series Dickinson and the 2022 film adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Hunt will next be seen in Kevin Costner’s four-part Western Horizon: An American Saga. After that, she’ll take on a comedic legend as Radner, who won an Emmy for her SNL tenure in 1978. The following year, Radner mounted a hit one-woman Broadway show, which was later filmed for the Mike Nichols–directed special Gilda Live. Radner died of ovarian cancer in 1989 at age 42; much of her legacy, as overseen for many years by her widower Gene Wilder, centers on early cancer detection and resources for those impacted by the disease.
From Getty Images.Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase
Smith, responsible for hard-edged characters like the Riddler in Fox’s Gotham and Julianne Moore’s eldest son in May December, has been tasked with the prickly Chase. Chase was the first Weekend Update host, introducing his broadcasts with the line, “I’m Chevy Chase…and you’re not.” He famously exited SNL during its second season to pursue a movie career, returning to host the show (and have an alleged physical alteration with the cast member who replaced him, Bill Murray). He made a string of lucrative movies (and one short-lived talk show) that included Vacation, Caddyshack, and Fletch before courting more controversy in his return to TV, Community.
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Matt Wood as John Belushi
A relative newcomer who appeared in the original Broadway cast of SpongeBob SquarePants and as the ill-fated Augustus Gloop in the Broadway First National Tour of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been cast as Belushi. In the years before his untimely death of a drug overdose in 1982 at age 33, Belushi spent four seasons on SNL and starred in hit films such as National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blues Brothers. His meteoric rise and fall has been chronicled in multiple books and a 2020 Showtime documentary from filmmaker R.J. Cutler, who told the Chicago Sun-Times, “For all the extraordinary achievement that Lorne Michaels deserves credit for in his decades of success with Saturday Night Live, the guy that put most of that cast together first, that was John Belushi. He collected all of those folks first. He was a visionary.”
From Getty Images.Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman
Fairn, who has appeared in few British TV projects and an episode of Black Mirror, will play Newman, who became one of SNL’s youngest original cast members when she was recruited away from her post as one of the founding members of the Groundlings. When she departed the series after five seasons, Newman cultivated a thriving career in animation voiceover and welcomed two children, including Hacks star Hannah Einbinder. At one point after her exit, Newman even recommended Lisa Kudrow to Michaels as a potential SNL cast member. Julia Sweeney nabbed the gig instead. “I was pretty disappointed because I thought, Maybe you’re one of those people for whom good things don’t happen,” the eventual Friends star told Vanity Fair in 2014.
From Getty Images.Kim Matula as Jane Curtin
After roles on The Bold and the Beautiful and Unreal, Matula rounds out the cast of Not Ready for Prime Time Players. This isn’t her first brush with playing a real-life person—she previously portrayed Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham on Impeachment: American Crime Story. As for Curtin, after five seasons with SNL, during which she was the show’s first female Weekend Update host, the performer starred in long-running series including Kate & Allie and 3rd Rock From the Sun. Last August, Curtin recalled rewatching early episodes of SNL for the first time in decades. Her review? “Not one thing was funny,” she told People, admitting, “That’s what happens with live TV, and with topical TV. It gets dated after a while. Remember, this was almost 50 years ago.”
From Getty Images.Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson
Hot off his four-season run on Succession, Braun will play the famed puppeteer, whose Muppets were a regular, if not always welcome, presence on SNL’s first season. “NBC was so scared of what Lorne…was doing that they insisted on Jim Henson and the Muppets [to] soften it,” agent Bernie Brillstein, who represented both Michaels and Henson, has said. The puppets, featured in The Land of Gorch sketches on the show, sparked behind-the-scenes tension due to differing comedic sensibilities between Henson and the rest of the writers. “Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch,” writer Alan Zweibel said, as quoted in Jim Henson by Brian Jay Jones. Fellow writer Michael O’Donoghue famously declared, “I won’t write for felt.” After a smattering of episodes, the Muppets got their own show, leaving SNL in the rearview.
From Getty Images.Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue
Bringing to life SNL’s first head writer is Dewey, who reunites with Reitman after starring on Hulu’s Casual and appearing in The Front Runner. O’Donoghue hailed from National Lampoon magazine and brought a sometimes controversial brand of comedy to the three seasons of the show he helmed. (He’d return sporadically throughout the ’80s.) Once christened “the angriest, craziest man to ever hate—but never really leave—Saturday Night Live,” in the time before his 1994 death, O’Donoghue told The New York Times that SNL had become “an embarrassment. It’s like watching old men die.”
From Getty Images.Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal
After starring in Apple TV+’s Hello Tomorrow! and playing Albus Potter in Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Podany has been cast as an early-career Crystal, who was bumped from the first episode of Saturday Night Live. While not an official cast member, Crystal said Michaels was priming him to eventually join the show full-time before his first sketch was cut. “I was upset—mad, I guess—because I had wanted to be there,” he said in James A. Miller and Tom Shales’s comprehensive oral history of SNL, Live From New York. “I was mad at my own managers because I wanted to do the show. And I didn’t want it to look like I was the guy who stormed off the show. That wasn’t the truth. But my managers were protecting me, and Lorne was protecting his show, which I respect.” Crystal would go on to host the show in 1976 before joining as a main cast member from 1984 to 1985.
From Getty Images.Kaia Gerber as Jacqueline Carlin
Following roles in Bottoms, Babylon, and American Horror Story, the model has booked her next acting gig playing Carlin, who appeared as an extra in SNL’s first three seasons, and was married to original cast member Chevy Chase from 1976 to 1980.
From Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images.Finn Wolfhard as an NBC page
The Stranger Things star is the only cast member to play a role not rooted in a real-life person. However, many NBC pages have gone onto successful onscreen careers, including Aubrey Plaza, Ted Koppel, and Regis Philbin.
From Getty Images.Andrew Feldman as Neil Levy
After breaking out playing opposite Jennifer Lawrence in last summer’s No Hard Feelings, Feldman has secured the role of SNL’s original talent coordinator and writer, who stayed with the show’s for 10 seasons.
