
He’s hinted at as much before, but Lorne Michaels is now making it crystal clear: if it had been up to him, Shane Gillis would never have been fired from Saturday Night Live.
“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels recalls in a new interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I was angry. I thought, ‘You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him,’ because I thought he was the real thing.”
Gillis, then a virtual unknown, was hired to join the cast of SNL in the fall of 2019 only to be fired days later after racist jokes he’d made on a podcast came to light.
As the online furor grew and advertisers threatened to boycott the show, it was NBC that ultimately brought down the hammer on Gillis. “That was very strong from the people in charge,” Michaels says. Obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.”
While his firing was an obvious setback for the young comic, Gillis went on to find fame on his own on the standup circuit, and even returned to host the show last year. Gillis and Michaels are said to have kept in touch over the years. In fact, according to Gillis himself, Michaels offered him the role of Donald Trump alongside SNL’s cold open all-stars this season. (Gillis declined.)
SNL is currently on a one-week break. The show is set to return November 2 with host John Mulaney and musical guest Chappell Roan.
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