Lamorne Morris grew up idolizing the first Black ‘SNL’ star. Now, he’s playing him in a movie.
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.”
“Saturday Night” opens nationwide Oct. 11.
