Lorne Michaels Will Shame ‘SNL’ Cast Members for One Extremely Specific Reason
We’ve all had difficult bosses, but not all of them have inspired multiple movie villains, one of which has the surname “Evil.”
While the public-facing Lorne Michaels is just a friendly old Canadian gentleman with a glass of white wine permanently attached to his right hand, working for the Saturday Night Live producer can be an aggravating experience (just ask poor old Billy Crystal).
In addition to the fact that he allegedly can keep people waiting in his office for longer than the running time of the entire Godfather trilogy, and reportedly likes to play cult-like mind games with his employees, Michaels also has a history of humbling cast members with an oddly specific criticism — and it involves wigs.
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John Mulaney and his former SNL writing partner Simon Rich (of Switcheroo infamy) recently spoke with The New Yorker, and revealed yet another way in which Michaels exerts his power. While discussing their new Broadway play All In, its director, Alex Timbers, bragged about the show’s minimal wardrobe. “I direct a lot of very elaborate musicals,” Timbers explained. “But here we thought, Why don’t we take away the costumes and everything else, and ignite the audience’s imagination?”
“This reminds me of a really dismissive thing Lorne Michaels likes to say when watching a sketch,” Rich interjected. “‘The wig is starring.’ Like, you’re leaning on a funny wig.”
Mulaney recalled that he, too, received some wig-based shade from Michaels: “One time, after watching one of my sketches, he just looked at me and went, ‘Wig city.’”
Okay, first of all, Michaels criticizing over-the-top wigs is a little like Chef Boyardee shit-talking ravioli. Wigs are an integral part of the show. According to Vogue, each episode of Saturday Night Live “features about 80 wigs.” Cast members even have to sometimes wear “self wigs,” which are wigs that just look like their normal hair that they can “throw on at any time.”
The show is so wig heavy that SNL literally “runs its own wig shop,” which is “located a floor above Studio 8H.” The wig department has a dummy head for each cast member so that they can create whatever wig is required in a shockingly short amount of time.
Clearly, Michaels was just using the wigs, which everybody acting in the show wears, to stoke some cast members’ and writers’ insecurities for some reason. Bill Hader tells a similar, non-wig-centric story about how Micahels approached him moments before his first Vincent Price sketch was about to go live and not-so-helpfully told the young performer, “I love this, but, why now?”
Seeing as how he said nothing about the sketch’s many wigs, perhaps that’s glowing praise.
