Saturday Night's Lorne Michaels Actor Had To Follow A Strict SNL Rule

"Saturday Night" is an ambitious, stressful film about the 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever episode of "Saturday Night Live." It's been criticized a bit by "SNL" superfans for being slightly inaccurate in some places, but that's forgivable considering that director Jason Reitman was hoping to make a compelling film first, an accurate film second. Certain personalities and conflicts had to be exaggerated for the sake of a more compelling story.

Case in point: Gabriel LaBelle was amazing in the role of a young Lorne Michaels, who's trying to keep the production from falling apart despite the growing suspicion that this show is doomed to fail. (Thankfully we know the show doesn't fail, but things get so stressful you almost think the movie might mess around with the timeline.) LaBelle gives a great performance, but he doesn't give a pitch-perfect impression of what the young "SNL" creator/showrunner was truly like. This, it turns out, was by design.

"I wanted to meet everyone and interview everyone," LaBelle explained in a recent interview with Jimmy Fallon. "Jason wanted us to do as minimum work as possible. He didn't want direct re-creations of these cast members and of these people. He wants us to feel like them and inhabit them and bring as much of our personalities as actors to them. And so I was like, 'When can I talk to Lorne?' He's like, 'You're not.'"

This idea of wanting the actor to not get too close to the person they're playing is pretty popular in the movie biz, even if it seems like common sense to want to meet them first. Movies are supposed to be true to life in a spiritual sense, not a literal sense, so LaBelle's version of Michaels didn't need to perfectly mimic every little vocal tic the real Michaels has.

This approach can be seen in a lot of adaptations of stories that have already been told in a visual medium. Bella Ramsey from "The Last of Us," for instance, was told not to play the video game before performing as Ellie, nor was she supposed to talk to the voice actress who originally played the character. It's very important that actor is able to bring their own spark to the role, with none of the previous portrayals of the character weighing them down.

Still, it's not like LaBelle came into the movie totally blind. He got some advice from director Steven Spielberg, who LaBelle had worked with in his devastating 2022 film "The Fabelmans." Spielberg, who was a massive fan of "SNL" and who flew to New York throughout all of season 1 to watch the show live, had a ton of stories about Michaels to tell LaBelle. 

Tragically, the actor didn't share any of these stories during his "Tonight Show" interview, although he noted that by listening to Spielberg's tales he was technically going against Jason Reitman's wishes. "I was uncomfortable because Jason didn't want me to talk to anybody who was there," he explained, "but I'm not gonna tell him to, like, shut up."