Lorne Michaels has said he was “angry” when Shane Gillis was fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 over resurfaced jokes using racist and homophobic language. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, the longtime showrunner also confirmed the decision was made by NBC rather than himself.
“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels said. “I was angry. I thought, You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing.”
Michaels added, “That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.”
Gillis was fired before SNL before appearing in a single episode, but came back to host an episode this past February. It was a controversial choice, but Michaels had stayed in touch while the comedian became a top standup act.
In a recent podcast appearance, Gillis claimed Michaels also asked him to revisit his Donald Trump impersonation for the entirety of Season 50, but he turned down the offer.
Last month, Michaels told The Hollywood Reporter that Gillis “got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier” and said there was a “velocity of cancellation” because “200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show.”
The backlash from those companies was hardly unwarranted; in one of the resurfaced videos from Gillis’ Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, he mocked a Chinese accent and used the slur “ch*nk” while discussing Chinatown.
Elsewhere in the WSJ interview, Michaels insisted that SNL doesn’t intentionally take a political stance: “There’s stupidity on both sides. Our job is to make fun of it.”
The next episode of Saturday Night Live airs on November 2nd with John Mulaney as host and Chappell Roan as the musical guest. Airing mere days before this year’s election, it will feature Maya Rudolph doing her best Kamala Harris impression.