Lamorne Morris grew up idolizing the first Black 'SNL' star. Now, he's playing him in a movie.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Growing up, Lamorne Morris enjoyed Garrett Morris' performances as Martin's boss on "Martin" and as Uncle Junior on "The Jamie Foxx Show." His only knowledge of the trailblazer at the time was that they shared the same last name.
"When I was a kid, I used to tell people he was my dad," he told NBC News.
He launched his own comedy career at Second City, considered a "Saturday Night Live" training ground, in his native Chicago. There, Morris, who grew up watching the Will Ferrell-Tina Fey era of the pop culture staple, learned that Garrett Morris was an original cast member on the series. Morris did the expected and tried out for the show.
"I auditioned for 'SNL' and did not get it. But here we are full circle," he said, referencing his role as the man with whom he shares a last name in the new film "Saturday Night."
Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris in "Saturday Night"Sony Pictures Entertainment
Jason Reitman's film isn't a sweeping biopic of the show currently in its 50th season. Instead, it centers on the behind-the-scenes chaos that almost prevented creator Lorne Michaels' iconic sketch-comedy variety series from making its debut in 1975.
Morris admitted that at first he was uneasy "playing somebody who is alive and can judge you." But he has played a real-life person before. He starred as a version of the cartoonist Keith Knight in the Hulu comedy series "Woke" for two seasons. The difference was that Knight, as a producer and writer on the show, was intimately involved in that process and could give him feedback. He found that Garrett Morris, who wasn't involved in the film, shared Knight's outlook.
"Garrett said, 'All I care about is you showing the audience I didn't give up, that I worked my butt off, and I tried.' And he goes, 'I had some problems for sure. Lorne could have fired me at any moment, but he didn't. And I stayed the course, and I had fun while I did it. As long as that comes across, then I'm happy,'" Morris recalled.
Garrett Morris as Chico Escuela, John Belushi as Frank Leary, Dan Aykroyd as Jack Neehauser, Buck Henry as Father Fitzfagen during "St. Mickey's Knights of Columbus" skit on Nov 11, 1978.Fred Hermansky / NBCUniversal
Conveying all of that in a few hours was daunting for Morris, but he said he heard Garrett Morris saw the movie and was pleased with it.
"It was a lot of pressure," he said. "For Garrett, going through this particular day, he was a fish out of water. We're 90 minutes from showtime and he doesn't even know what his place is on the show."
Morris said he was inspired to pull from his own experience, which he found similar to that of the man he was playing. "People sometimes would identify you as, 'Oh, yeah, the Black dude,'" he said of those early days. "And Garrett was getting that a lot. It didn't matter what the sketch was, his race came into play for some reason. And I was getting that a lot. So I just pulled from my own experiences to try to figure out what it is I'm doing here."
Reitman, the director, also aided in that process.
"He wanted me to feel like how Garrett felt that day. So there are moments when you will see a big group scene where everyone is doing something and then you'd see Garrett off by himself. And that was intentional by Jason, and it sometimes made me feel some kind of way as Lamorne," said Morris, whose next big project is the upcoming MGM+ and Prime Video live-action series "Spider-Man Noir," set in the 1930s and based on the Marvel comic of the same name. Morris plays journalist Robbie Robertson opposite series lead Nicolas Cage.
Not everything Reitman includes in "Saturday Night" leading up to the debut is factual, however. That's true of Morris performing a snippet of Garrett Morris' infamous "Kill All the Whiteys" ditty in a later "SNL" episode.
"This isn't necessarily specific to what happened on that day. There are a lot of liberties he took on putting things in different places. He wanted to give everyone a well-rounded arc, so he added scenes from this episode of 'SNL' and this moment," Morris said.
"You book a movie like this, and you have to do your research," he said. "And then it becomes less about doing research for the movie and more so about doing research for your own life, because this man went through a lot. Talking with him and hearing his experiences with the Civil Rights Movement, with helping to desegregate the unions and things like that, there should be a movie about Garrett Morris' life."
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