The ‘Saturday Night Live’ Movie Has Found Its Lorne Michaels

How does one follow the Herculean feat of embodying a pop culture icon on screen? By playing another. After earning a Critics’ Choice nomination for his performance as young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, Gabriel LaBelle has been cast as Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels in an upcoming film, Deadline reports.

The 21-year-old actor will lead SNL 1975, a behind-the-scenes reimagining of the NBC sketch series’ opening night from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jason Reitman. Rachel Sennott, best known for Bottoms and Shiva Baby, will play Rosie Shuster, one of the show’s original writers. Cooper Hoffman, star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, and son of the late Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, has been enlisted to portray Dick Ebersol, one of NBC’s late-night executives at the time of SNL’s origins. No other cast has been revealed, but the movie is likely to feature some of the show’s original Not Ready for Primetime Players including John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner.

Written by Reitman and his Ghostbusters: Afterlife collaborator Gil Kenan, the film is reportedly based on “extensive series of interviews conducted by Reitman and Kenan with all the living cast, writers and crew,” according to Deadline and depicts the events leading up to SNL’s first broadcast on October 11, 1975. Reitman, whose late father Ivan helped launch the film careers of SNL alumni including Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd with films like Ghostbusters and Meatballs, is producing along with Kenan, Jason Blumenfeld, Erica Mills, and Peter Rice.

As the longstanding series nears its 50th anniversary, Michaels has been asked about his successor as showrunner. “It could easily be Tina Fey,” the 79-year-old told Entertainment Tonight at the recent 2024 Emmys, though his replacement could also be “a lot of people” who currently work at Studio 8H. “Of course I’ve thought about it,” Michaels continued. “We’re doing the 50th anniversary show in February of ‘25. So I will definitely be there for that, and definitely be there until that. And sometime before that we’ll figure out what we’re gonna do.”

When recently asked about his remarks on the Today show, Fey joked, “He’s not going to retire. He has an elixir and he will live forever.”