Ranking ‘Saturday Night’s Not Ready for Primetime Players By How Well They Evoke the Original Cast
Saturday Night Live has long been known for its stars’ impressions of everyone from current politicians like Kamala Harris to historical figures like Vincent Price. Saturday Night, the movie set in the moments before its series premiere, isn’t aiming for verisimilitude on that level: the actors might be playing real-life people, but they’re also creating characters. The object isn’t an SNL, or even MADtv-level impersonation, and the performances shouldn’t really be judged on that basis.
So consider the ranking below — focused solely on the actors playing the show’s original seven cast members, known as the Not Ready for Primetime Players — purely a novelty, and don’t use it to fill out your ballot when it’s time to vote for the Oscars.
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Warning: Contains moderate spoilers for Saturday Night.
Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman
In keeping with the way the show treated its female performers for its first couple of decades, Newman doesn’t get much to do in Saturday Night. She moons after Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) as he hits on basically every woman who crosses his path. She demonstrates for Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) how she can quick-change costumes in order to stop him from cutting one of her sketches. Fairn does what she can, but the role is so underwritten that it’s hard to get a sense of her.
Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris
The biggest issue with Saturday Night is that it’s written as though everyone in it knows they’re in a historical movie. Considering the real-time conceit — it takes place over the 90 minutes that precede the first episode of Saturday Night (the Live was added later) — there’s a lot of moments where characters just plant themselves and explain what their deal is. Morris is a published playwright who attended Juilliard and performed La Traviata in Italian, and thus, he’s in a crisis about what he’s doing in the cast of a show like this. If you take a bathroom break the first time he explains any of this, don’t worry: Every time the action returns to him, he’s continuing to spin out while listing credentials.
Considering how much the dialogue wants us to see Morris in all three dimensions, the action, disappointingly, really flattens him.
Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner
Hunt has one of the tougher jobs, portraying a cast member who isn’t only deceased, but whose memory has reached near-mythic status. Radner has to be both the edgy, counterculture comic performer she would have had to be to get cast in this show, and the ethereal sprite of later legend. Hunt is very game to pull faces and put on a burbly voice, but as is the case with so many SNL characters, the wig is doing most of the work.
Kim Matula as Jane Curtin
As Curtin demonstrates for Morris as they’re killing time between rehearsal setups, her career to this point has thrived due to her talent for being palatable and normal; with the other female cast members, she shrugs that her lane on this show is as a still-attractive mother. Like the real Curtin, Matula has a gift for making conventionality seem subversive. (If you haven’t already seen her performance as flight attendant Ronnie in the sadly short-lived sitcom L.A. to Vegas, you won’t regret seeking it out.)
Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase
Smith’s job is pretty much the opposite of Hunt’s, in that he’s playing a real person who is widely known to be a hateful asshole, and who specifically started his reign of terror getting overpraised on the very show this movie is about. Since Chase’s reputation is so widely known, the script doesn’t waste too much space on trying to humanize him; the closest we really get to pathos is when Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) easily bests him in conversational combat, but even then, it’s very clear Chase deserves what he gets, and Smith never cheats in portraying Chase’s apparently innate jerkiness.
I might have ranked this performance higher if not for two late moments I couldn’t believe: 1) when brand-new writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) hands him a Weekend Update joke and Chase acknowledges it appreciatively; and 2) when, in the last minutes before showtime, he pitches in on building the floor of the home base set. Everything I’ve ever known about the real Chevy Chase tells me he’s never helped anyone with anything.
Matt Wood as John Belushi
Like Morris, Belushi isn’t sure doing the show is the right move for him. Unlike Morris, Belushi’s ambivalence gets the “show, don’t tell” treatment. Wood makes Belushi’s anxiety, artistic rigor and his comic chops come alive. Granted, he has a very intense and physically kinetic character to play, but Wood’s interpretation still deserves credit for being as visceral as it is.
Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd
As a Canadian, I’ve known Aykroyd as a pop-cultural figure for what feels like my entire life. So seeing O’Brien — a former child star! one of the cuties on MTV’s Teen Wolf! the Maze Runner himself! — open his mouth and speak in Aykroyd’s voice was astonishing. Aykroyd’s role is less showy than those of his three male co-stars, but the transformation O’Brien achieves makes him by far the MVP among the movie’s not quite Not Ready for Primetime Players.
