Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels is making some changes to the cast of the long-running sketch comedy program this season.
Asked in a recent interview with Puck if he was going to “shake things up” for season 51 after there weren’t any major cast departures following the show’s 50th season finale, Michaels, 80, said “yes.”.
“Last season, when we were at the party of the first show, quarter of four in the morning, Dana [Carvey, who played Joe Biden] comes over to me and says, ‘I don’t think anyone knows you called me June 4th [to play Biden],’” he said.
“I wanted people coming back and being part of [the 50th season],” he added. “So when Kate [McKinnon] hosted, Kristen [Wiig] and Maya [Rudolph] came back for it. And that meant there couldn’t be those kind of disruptions [to the cast], or anything that was going to take the focus off [the 50th season]. And we had an election.”
Asked whether he felt “pressured to reinvent this season,” Michaels said he does.
“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “It’ll be announced in a week or so.”
Although he didn’t say who could be leaving and entering the season 51 cast, he did confirm that James Austin Johnson will remain on the show, reprising his role as President Donald Trump.
SNL’s 50th season included cast members Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, Marcello Hernandez, Michael Longfellow, Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson, Bowen Yang, Devon Walker, and Weekend Update co-hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost.
Featured players Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline also joined the cast last year.
The 51 season premiere airs on NBC Saturday, October 4.
Each episode of the season will feature a different celebrity host and musical guest, who have yet to be announced.
After five decades of creating the show, Michaels said he doesn’t have any plans to retire or leave NBC. “I may be wrong. But I don’t feel I’m done,” he told The New York Times in February.
During the interview with Puck, Michaels acknowledged that he’s answered the retirement questions “many times.” However, he did share that throughout the next season, he’s going to give his colleagues some more responsibilities.
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“That’s already been happening [in] the past year or so,” he said.
“More people are involved in the choices and in the decisions. But I’m not worried about A.I. because A.I. can’t guess what I’m gonna do between 10 and 11 [on show nights] … because I have no idea!” he explained. “There’s a lot of people in that room with a lot of opinions. I make the final decision, obviously. But it’s not as if people don’t let me know how strongly they feel.”
