‘SNL’s Ego Nwodim Is Just Latest Cast Member With ‘Daddy Lorne’ Issues

Ego Nwodim claims that a lot of people are intimidated by her boss, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels — but she’s not one of them. “I know people are scared of him, but ain’t nothing to be scared of,” Nwodim told Interview. 

“What a curious man,” Nwodim explained. “I get flowers from him for my birthday every year, and I’m like, the man knows how to charm a woman.” But Nwodim's most telling statement about her relationship with SNL's head honcho? “One time I slipped up and called him Daddy Lorne to his face.”

Before you make the call to NBC Human Resources, know that SNL cast members have had daddy issues with Michaels for decades. “I read a thing in the Times about Tina Fey and she said something like, ‘Well, you really want to please Daddy,’ with regard to Lorne,” said original Saturday Night Live writer Marilyn Suzanne Miller in oral history Live From New York. “But Jesus, we thought he was Daddy when I was 25 and he was 30. He was that strict father even when we were kids. You would always look to Lorne for approval. You wanted this father figure to say that was good.”

“We worked with him before he had children,” added SNL writer Christine Zander. “I think we were probably all his children before he had children. Lorne somehow manages to be a paternal figure.”

Is playing Daddy one of the keys to Michaels’ success on the show? “I think a lot of us are comfortable with or afflicted by or taken with distant fathers,” explained Ana Gasteyer. “So I think there’s a comfort with Lorne’s silence for a lot of us.”

“You can’t help but make this sort of analogy that the show was our mother and Lorne was our father and you wanted to please both of them,” said Nora Dunn. “You certainly didn’t want Lorne to be angry with you.”

But not all cast members love the idea of Michaels as a father figure. “Lorne says I made him like my dad,” griped Jon Lovitz, “which I didn’t.”

Nonetheless, Michaels motivated the cast and staff by treating them as if they were a bunch of children, maintains writer Alan Zweibel. “If we were denied Daddy’s — his — approval, we worked harder and harder to get it,” he has said. “Some thrived on that. Some didn’t.”

Harry Shearer was one who did not. “Lorne’s approach to the cast was to infantalize them,” he said. “He wanted them to be like children; he’d be the daddy. That was his preferred way of relating to people. And I didn’t particularly want to relate that way.”

Given his style, Michaels picked the right profession, says Jane Curtin. “He gets to lord over people who want to kneel at his feet and he doesn’t acknowledge them — which makes them work harder.”