‘Saturday Night’ star Lamorne Morris wants to host ‘SNL’: ‘Man, I won an Emmy this year’
Lamorne Morris has had a great few months. The erstwhile “New Girl” star won his first-ever Emmy Award in September for his empathetic performance on the FX limited series “Fargo,” earned strong reviews for playing Garrett Morris (no relation) in the “Saturday Night Live” origin film “Saturday Night,” and even reunited with his former “New Girl” co-stars Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, and Damon Wayans Jr. for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue. But there is at least one hill Morris still wants to climb.
“I want to host the damn show,” Morris tells Gold Derby about “SNL.” “But Lorne Michaels, you know, he doesn’t return my phone calls. He doesn’t answer the door when I show up at his house, unannounced. I think I’ve hosted for Jimmy Kimmel maybe five times at this point, and my favorite part is the monologue. You know what I mean? You’re doing bits, you’re saying funny things, and the people behind the camera help you out a lot. So I’m like, ‘SNL’ is a no-brainer, guys. Somebody who knows Lorne, let him know. Why not? Man, I won an Emmy this year. It’s a good time.” Watch the video interview above.
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Morris has long been fascinated by “Saturday Night Live.” A Second City alum, he even once auditioned for the NBC sketch comedy series but failed to convert his efforts into a job on the show.
“It’s such a hard process. So all those folks who get cast on the show, they’re brilliant. They are going to the wringer, and they earned that spot to be there,” Morris says.
So when he was cast as Garrett Morris in “Saturday Night,” Morris had a good idea of what his onscreen counterpart and the rest of the Not Ready for Primetime Players were experiencing at the time.
“I know how hard it is to get a show off the ground, and how many moving pieces there are to get something off the ground,” he says. “So while the audition process for ‘SNL’ wasn’t a big part of my motivation for this project, it was just my experience as a performer in general that helped the process. It’s always chaotic, it’s always hectic. You rarely get a smooth transition into something. At some point, chaos will ensue.”
Co-written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, “Saturday Night” is all about that chaos. The film unfolds in real-time in the 90 minutes before “Saturday Night Live” debuted on October 11, 1975. As imagined by Reitman and Kenan, those final minutes before Michaels and the cast made history were filled with questions and self-doubt from almost everyone involved with the show, notably Garrett Morris. A Julliard-trained actor and playwright, Garrett was older than the rest of his castmates and spent much of the film trying to figure out his place in the ensemble.
“He was struggling with his identity there. He didn’t know exactly how he would fit, which piece of the puzzle is he because it didn’t seem to fit at some point,” Morris says of Garrett. “Then, throughout his journey, he realizes, ‘Oh, I just slide in right here.’ So I knew that if I played that emotion and if everything else in the performance failed, at least I knew that the entire movie wouldn’t have suffered.”
Unlike the other cast members, Morris spoke to Garrett about his performance and the film (Reitman suggested the young stars keep a distance from the “SNL” veterans; Dylan O’Brien, who plays Dan Aykroyd, still hasn’t met the “Ghostbusters” star).
SEE‘Saturday Night’ hair and makeup interview
“When Garrett was happy with my portrayal of him, then I was happy. No matter what, no matter who else liked it, I could always go back and say he liked it. So I’m good with that,” Morris says.
As for what Garrett pecifically responded to in Morris’ performance, the actor says it was his honesty down to even the most minor details, like the way Garrett smoked.
“We talked before shooting about his cigarette smoking, and how he would hide cigarettes around the set. He always had a cigarette,” Morris says. “It was a security blanket for him. And so I went into it knowing that a lot of my movement would be based on the cigarette. And there’s a certain ism that a person who chain smokes has and I wanted to make sure I had that in there. He appreciated that.”
While Morris may have to wait for Michaels to call him about “Saturday Night Live,” he’s got plenty of other projects in the works – including several things with his “New Girl” pals, like a guest appearance on Wayans’ show “Poppa’s House” and a film he’s putting together with Johnson. And then there’s always the possibility of more “New Girl” as well – if the powers that be ever decide to mount a revival.
“We have talked about a reunion as well, but that’s out of our hands,” he says about returning to play Winston on the beloved comedy. “But we’d all love to do it.”
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