Saturday Night is only the ninth feature that Cory Michael Smith has ever appeared in, yet he approached the task with the discipline of a pro. The ticking-clock film, which dramatizes in real time the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live in 1975, cast the 37-year-old as one of the sketch series’ most iconic faces: Chevy Chase. He’d have to spar with a young Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle). He’d have to go on “Weekend Update” and deliver jokes as Chase actually did. Perhaps most dauntingly, he’d need to reintroduce us to a complex, often controversial comedy legend and make him feel both real and fresh.
You could argue no one was better suited to the job. Smith’s characterization is near uncanny from beginning to end, an impressive feat of transformation. But it’s the prickly pathos he locates within a notoriously big ego that helps the performance stand out within such a big ensemble. Smith prepared by immersing himself in Chase’s filmography and world, and figuring out his line of attack. He always works this way, from his acclaimed breakout role on HBO’s Olive Kitteridge to his popular turn as Gotham’s Riddler to his scene-stealing parts in Todd Haynes’s Carol and May December.
“He’s a tremendous actor and took on a really hard role,” Saturday Night director Jason Reitman tells me. “With Chevy, there’s a tonality to his voice and even his eyes closed that you can recognize. With each one of them, I watched [him] navigate, Am I doing an impersonation of them as a real person, or am I doing an impersonation of them when they do sketches? He found that balance.”
Following Saturday Night’s electric launch in Telluride at the end of August, Smith is in Toronto on the morning of the film’s Canadian premiere. He hasn’t seen the movie yet. “I get to sit in a theater tonight and watch my first comedy for the first time with a large theater,” he says as we get going. “I’m really very, very excited for this.”
Vanity Fair: This is your first comedy film—and you’re playing Chevy Chase.
Cory Michael Smith: Yeah, this could have gone really wrong when I was first offered this job. During the process of auditioning, I didn’t see it. I didn’t have the confidence that I was the best person for this, but I’m always down to take a swing for things that are cool. When I got the job, I was really baffled. The thing that really hit me was like, “Oh, shit, this could be actually the end of my comedy career.”
Well, the beginning and the end.
Yeah, so it felt like a real risk. But at least in this job, those often turn out to be the most fulfilling things. So my preparation and my work on this was fueled very much by not wanting to fail. It’s never good to work from a place of fear, but sometimes it does kick your ass a little bit.
Did you feel confident that you could be funny here?
The thing that was crazy for me in this situation is I’m reading the script at first and the instinct, of course, is to think, “How would I make this funny?” But that’s not the task. The task is, “What is Chevy’s instinct with this?” This is part of why I was a little terrified. I don’t know how Chevy would say this.
I decided that for a while, I wouldn’t watch anything except for him. It felt like the only way that I could really make sure that I wasn’t muddying my objective, which was to get as close as possible without it feeling like I’m just doing an impression. I spent, truly, hundreds of hours watching Chevy Chase, and often just in the background. I’m watching all of [SNL] season one and studying him. The thing that ended up being the most helpful was his first film, Foul Play. And there was an interview that Chevy did, reflecting on his past, and he said that the character of Fletch was the character that was closest to him.
