Saturday Night star Gabriel LaBelle got some great advice for playing Lorne Michaels from an unlikely source: Steven Spielberg. According to the actor, Spielberg is something of a Saturday Night Live superfan.
LaBelle visited (the real) 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Monday to guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he revealed the unlikely role Spielberg played in helping him prep for Saturday Night. LaBelle plays Michaels in the new biopic, which captures the SNL creator just barely holding the sketch show together on the night it premiered back in 1975.
Chatting with Fallon, the actor explained that Saturday Night director Jason Reitman didn’t want the cast to meet the real-life subjects they were portraying before filming.
“He didn’t want direct recreations of these people,” LaBelle explained to Fallon. “He wants us to feel like them and inhabit them, and bring as much of our personalities as actors to them.”
However, LaBelle accidentally stumbled into some research while gearing up for the shoot. While on the Universal Studios lot for costume fittings, LaBelle caught up with Spielberg, whom he portrayed in the director’s semi-autobiographical 2022 film The Fabelmans.
“As soon as I sit down, [Spielberg]’s like, ‘This is what I know about Saturday Night Live,’” LaBelle recalled.
“He told me stories of everyone,” LaBelle went on. “It was amazing. But I was uncomfortable, because Jason didn’t want me to talk to anybody who was there. But I’m not gonna tell him to, like, shut up!”
As LaBelle revealed, Spielberg’s knowledge of SNL came firsthand. In 1975, the director—fresh off the success of Jaws—had been hearing rumblings about an exciting new TV show in New York. “He was there for the first episode,” LaBelle said.
“He was living in LA, but he became such good friends, and loved the show so much, that every Friday of that first season, he would fly to New York, watch the show on Saturday, then fly back to LA on Sunday,” LaBelle told Fallon. “The whole first season.”
LaBelle did eventually meet the man he was portraying when Michaels invited the cast of Saturday Night to a real SNL taping. The cast attended the Josh Brolin-hosted episode in March, which took place the night before production on Saturday Night began.
Saturday Night is playing in select theaters now. It opens nationwide on Friday, October 11.
