Garrett Morris, Saturday Night Live (SNL)’s first Black cast member, appeared on the show from 1975 to 1980 and was best known for his portrayal of the fictional Dominican baseball player Chico Escuela. However, it was his role as Stan Winters on the first three seasons of Martin Lawrence’s self-titled ‘90s sitcom Martin that made a lasting impression on Lamorne Morris, who portrays Garrett in Saturday Night, the Jason Reitman-directed story behind the debut episode of the NBC sketch comedy set for theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto on Sept. 27., and worldwide on Oct. 11.
“Whenever you see someone on TV, if you’re an up-and-coming actor, it seems like an impossible task,” Morris tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Martin, in particular, he’s a master of characters. Every actor on that show had the ability to play multiple characters. They were so funny, so loose, it mirrored how me and my friends spoke to each other. And I just thought, ‘Well, damn, we could do this, let’s give it a shot.’
Adds Morris: “As you move through the ranks of comedy, you start to realize more and more is possible.”
The Chicago native’s rise has included starring on Fox’s New Girl for seven seasons and landing the lead role on Hulu’s Woke before joining the cast of Fargo in its fifth season as Trooper Witt Farr, the role for which he garnered the Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a limited or anthology series. Two decades of comedy experience under his belt and an innate sense of kinship to Garrett who shares his last name, though the two are of no relation, Morris didn’t hesitate to audition when he received an email about the Saturday Night role early one morning.
Here, he talks with THR about his conversations with Garrett Morris, perfecting the Julliard-trained performer’s distinct voice and recreating his infamous “Kill all the whiteys” SNL bit.
How and when did this role come to you, and was any part of you intimidated by the prospect of portraying Garrett Morris?
Oof, well, I remember I was in Chicago, I was at home, and I got the email. I was still in bed, I checked my phone, and I immediately popped up out of bed and said, “I’m doing this shit right now. I can do this. I know Garrett. This is my wheelhouse.” And I got up and I set up my camera in my bedroom. I went in my brother’s room, got an old jacket and a tie. And I put my hair in a little bit of an afro because my hair was growing out at the time, and I just did it. And I felt very confident about it because I’d been living with Garrett in my head for a long time. We have the same last name, and people are always asking if we’re related. And I grew up watching Martin. So you just know this man. And I had so much fun putting together that tape. Was it intimidating? Absolutely, because I don’t personally know this man. So my fear was that he was gonna go, “This motherfucker sucks.” That’s what I thought. I got in my mind, like, what if he really hates me? What if Garrett sends an email out to everybody that says, “This guy is terrible, please don’t ever hire him again,” You always, before you play a character, think the worst. You always think the sky will fall. But apparently Garrett really enjoyed the movie.
You presented Garrett with the Hollywood Legacy Award at the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) Honors earlier this year alongside Leslie Jones. How much time, if any, were you able to spend with him once you landed the role? And what did he share with you about his experience joining SNL?
I spent more time with him over Zoom and on the phone than I did in person. When we were at ABFF, that was the most time I had spent with him in person. We sat at the table just talking and chit-chatting, and over Zoom, the questions that I had for him were pretty much what his relationships with the rest of the cast were. Because I knew the backdrop. The backdrop was Garrett was the only Black dude on the show. And a lot of the writers were racist, and the jokes were a certain type of way he wasn’t necessarily comfortable with. So he had beef with certain writers and things like that. I knew that setting was where he was living. But I wanted to know, with the rest of the castmates, who he vibed with, who he partied with.
Obviously back then drugs were a huge part of SNL and the culture in general. People were doing cocaine in meetings. That’s just how they got down back then. So Garrett was like, “man, everybody was having a good time. It was a bunch of wild and crazy kids playing around.” So once he broke it down to me like that, it kind of helped me once we got to set. ‘Cause once we got to set, you start seeing the energy of everybody else and what everybody likes to do. And then I’m going to each actor and I’m explaining to them what Garrett said about the person that they’re playing, and we collabed that way.
You, Jon Batiste and the band are the only Black actors in the film. Did you feel like you could sense what it was like for Garrett in that way?
A little bit. I have a very similar walk in my career. I was always called, “the Black dude from that show.” For a long time, people didn’t know my name. They just knew, “you’re the Black dude.” So I identified with that for sure. But when we were on set, there were definitely moments where you feel it. Jason, the guy’s a master at what he does. He knew what Garrett was going through, so he didn’t want the audience to look around and go, “there’s a lot of Black people there. What is Garrett complaining about?” Because that is the gripe. That was his thing. People weren’t given opportunities like that. So, Jason, he would do these things where he would isolate Garrett, where the big group is over here, and he would say, “Garrett wouldn’t fraternize in these types of moments,” and I would be over there doing my thing and kind of outward looking in until I got to really know the rest of the cast. He really took his time kind of etching out the minutiae of what these people were going through.
You said you felt you knew Garrett before auditioning, but did you have to spend time perfecting his voice?
Oh, 100 percent. You know, there are different vocal qualities to Garrett. Garrett is a performer. So he’s naturally a bold and big, larger-than-life presence. When you watch Martin, you remember some of the things that he would do. When he talked to Martin, he would always put his chest back and his head back and go, “ah, Martin.” He kind of had that Sammy Davis thing going on sometimes. But he was a little different when he was in his regular life. He was way more chill. He would smoke cigarettes and then you’d have these conversations, man, where he’d just talk to folks, but there’s this musicality to his voice where it’s up and down, it’s very sing-songy because the man is a singer. He sang La traviata in Italian. So I had to watch a lot of his interviews and workshop a bunch of stuff.
And then you had to sing as well. Talk about the scene where you perform “Kill All the Whiteys.”
He did that sketch in a scene called the “Death Row Follies.” I worked with a vocal coach named Dave Stroud, who really helped me try to get to exactly how Garrett sounded in that sketch. We were really working hard. Hopefully it’s in the ballpark. Garrett was going through a lot on this show, and that particular song, he said, cemented his place there. He knew “okay, I can do this. This is what my strengths are. I’m a performer.” And obviously it worked out beautifully. There’s an interview where Garrett talks about it, so I’m not spoiling anything. He talks about how that song came to be because there was an old show in the ‘50s that someone was telling him about where the host of the show would go to the audience and have someone sing. And so he pulled this older white lady out of the crowd and asked her, “hey, sing a song.” And so she was like, “okay, I have a song.” And the song she sang was, “I’m gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the ni—-s I see.” And everyone got shocked and they cut the cameras and they immediately went to a commercial. And he said he remembered that and he just switched it. And I think the cool thing about that is that it set the tone for SNL to push the envelope and to let America know, “Hey, these young funny people are coming and they’re no holds barred, and they will insult you. They will parody you. They will make fun of you if you’re a politician, if you’re anything.”
In the film, the cast members are first introduced in a sequence which was captured in one shot.
Oh boy (sighs).
What was it like getting that right?
So we did that twice. We had two days of that to figure it out. It was crazy. When I first met with Jason, post getting the job, I believe he said he wanted to shoot this entire movie as a one-er, the entire movie. You rehearse it for a month, and then you spend five days, and every day you shoot the movie. And I just thought, “Whoa, boy, you on crack. What kind of drug are you ingesting, Jason?” (Laughs.) So he didn’t do that, but these one-ers were intense. These are like five, six minute one-ers so if anything goes off the rails, you have to start over from the beginning. At one point we had this counter going, now we’re on take 12, take 21, take 23, and we were making bets on whether we were going to be over 30 or under 30. I remember we got to, I think take 24, and Jason said this will be the last take and then we’re right at the end and one guy is walking and he’s supposed to say his line and I look him in the eye, and he freezes and he goes “ah fuck,” and everybody just burst out laughing because we were so close. That was a very, very intense day. You had a llama, you’ve got different characters, this is your first opportunity to introduce yourself in this film. It was chaotic, but I give it to Jason. Jason shot the entire movie with stand-ins before we even got there. So he knew the choreography.
When do you first remember seeing Garrett on SNL, and was or is being on the show a goal for you?
Yeah, SNL is a big goal for me. I auditioned for SNL, didn’t get it, which is fine. Full circle moment here. I had a second city background, improv background, sketch comedy, so, always, SNL is a goal. The same year I didn’t book it, I got New Girl. So I was very blessed to land on that show. It all worked out. But I would say the first time I remember Garrett was a sketch for the hearing impaired [“News for the Hard of Hearing”] where he would just scream everything that the person was saying so the deaf folks could really hear him. And Chico Escuela, where he would go, “baseball is very, very good to me.” I remember those sketches just in passing. And it was crazy, because I didn’t even realize I’d seen those sketches until after I’d gotten the part. Then I went back to watch some of his old sketches and went, “oh, I know this one.” “Oh, I know that one too.” It all started coming back to me.
