Lamorne Morris on Garrett Morris’ experience on ‘SNL’

Garrett Morris, Saturday Night Live (SNL), appeared on the show from 1975 to 1980 and was best known for his role as the fictional Dominican baseball player Chico Escuela. However, it was his role as Stan Winters in the first three seasons of Martin Lawrence’s self-titled 90s sitcom. Martini which made a lasting impression on Lamorne Morris, who portrays Garrett in Saturday nightthe Jason Reitman-directed story behind the debut episode of the NBC sketch comedy, which opens in theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto on September 27 and worldwide on October 11.

“Whenever you see someone on TV, if you’re a breakthrough actor, it seems like an impossible task,” says Morris. The Hollywood Reporter. “Martin, in particular, is a master of characters. Every actor in that show had the ability to play multiple characters. They were so funny, so free, that they mirrored the way my friends and I talked to each other. And I just thought, “Well, heck, we could do that, let’s try.”

Morris adds, “As you go through the ranks of comedy, you start to realize that more and more is possible.”

The Chicago native’s rise included starring on Fox’s The New Girl for seven seasons and landing the lead role on Hulu’s I woke up before joining the cast Fargo in the fifth season as Trooper Witt Farr, a role for which he won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series. With two decades of comedy experience under his belt and an innate sense of kinship with Garrett, who shares his last name, even though the two are unrelated, Morris didn’t hesitate to audition when he received an email about Saturday night role in an early morning.

Here, he talks to THR about his conversations with Garrett Morris, honing the Julliard-trained performer’s distinctive voice and recreating his infamous “Kill all the whiteys” SNL bit.

How and when did this role come to you, and was any part of you intimidated by the prospect of playing Garrett Morris?

Oof, well, I remember I was in Chicago, I was at home, and I got the email. I was still in bed, I checked my phone, and I immediately got out of bed and said, “I’m doing this right now. I can do that. I know Garrett. This is my wheelhouse.” And I got up and put my camera in the bedroom. I went into my brother’s room, got an old jacket and a tie. And I put my hair in a little afro because my hair was growing at the time and I just did it. And I felt very confident about it because I had been living with Garrett in my head for a long time. We have the same last name and people always ask if we are related. And I grew up watching Martini. So you know this man. And I had so much fun capping the house. Was it intimidating? Absolutely, because I don’t know this man personally. So my fear was that he would say, “That bastard sucks.” That’s what I thought. I thought to myself, like does he really hate me? What if Garrett sends an email to everyone saying, “This guy is terrible, please don’t ever hire him again.” You always think the worst before you play a character. You always think the sky is going to fall. But Garrett apparently really enjoyed the movie.

You presented Garrett with the Hollywood Legacy Award at American Black Film Festival (ABFF) Honors earlier this year with Leslie Jones. How much time, if any, were you able to spend with him once you landed the role? And what he shared with you about his joining experience SNL?

I spent more time with him via Zoom and on the phone than I did in person. When I went to ABFF, that was the most time I spent with him in person. We sat down at the table just talking and chatting, and on Zoom, the questions we had for him were kind of what are his relationships with the rest of the cast. Because I knew the background. In the background, Garrett was the only black person on the show. And a lot of the writers were racist, and the jokes were a certain kind of way that he wasn’t necessarily comfortable with. So he had beef with certain writers and stuff like that. I knew that setting was where he lived. But I wanted to know, along with the rest of the cast mates, who he vibed with, who he hung out with.

Obviously, drugs were a big part of it back then SNL and culture in general. People used cocaine on dates. That’s how they went down then. So Garrett said, “Man, everybody was having a good time. It was a bunch of wild, crazy kids playing.” So once he explained it to me like that, it kind of helped me once we got ready. Because once we get our act together, you start to see everyone else’s energy and what everyone likes to do. And then I go to each actor and explain to them what Garrett said about the person they’re playing, and we kind of collaborated that way.

You, Jon Batiste and the band are the only black actors in the film. Did you feel like you could feel what it was like for Garrett in that way?

A little bit. I have a very similar step in my career. I was always called “the black guy from that show”. For a long time, people didn’t know my name. They just knew, “you’re the black one.” So I identified with that for sure. But when we were on set, there were definitely times when you felt it. Jason, the guy is a master at what he does. He knew what Garrett was going through, so he didn’t want the audience to look around and say, “There’s a lot of black people out there. Why is Garrett complaining?” Because that’s what dissatisfaction is. That was his job. People were not given such opportunities. So, Jason, he’d do these things where he’d isolate Garrett, where the big group is here, and he’d say, “Garrett wouldn’t fraternize at times like this,” and I’d be there doing my thing . and I looked on the outside until I really got to know the rest of the cast. He even took the time to break down the details of what these people were going through.

You said you felt like you knew Garrett before he auditioned, but did you have to spend time perfecting his voice?

Oh, 100 percent. You know, Garrett has different vocal qualities. Garrett is a performer. So he’s naturally a bold, big, larger-than-life presence. When you look Martiniyou remember some of the things he would do. When he talked to Martin he always threw his chest back and his head back and said “ah, Martin”. Sometimes that Sammy Davis thing happens. But it was a little different when he was in his regular life. It was much colder. He was smoking cigarettes and then you’d have these conversations, man, where he was just talking to people, but there’s this musicality in his voice where it’s up and down, it’s very singable because the man is a singer. He sang La traviata in Italian. So I got to watch a lot of his interviews and find out a lot of things.

And then you had to sing too. Talk about the scene where you perform “Kill All the Whiteys.”

He did that sketch in a scene called “The Follies of the Death Row.” I worked with a vocal coach named Dave Stroud, who really helped me try to get exactly what Garrett sounded like in that sketch. We really work hard. Let’s hope he’s in the field. Garrett has been through a lot on this show, and that song, he said, cemented his place there. He knew “okay, I can do this. These are my strong points. I’m a performer.” And obviously it turned out beautifully. There’s an interview where Garrett talks about it, so I’m not spoiling anything. He talks about how that song came about because there was an old show in the ’50s that someone would tell him about where the host of the show would go into the audience and have someone sing. And so he pulled this older white lady out of the crowd and asked her, “hey, sing a song.” And so he said, “Okay, I have a song.” And the song he sang was, “I’m gonna get a gun and I’m gonna kill them all–I see them.” And they were all shocked and cut the cameras and immediately went to a commercial. And he said he remembered that and changed it. And I think the interesting thing is that it set the tone SNL to push the envelope and let America know, “Hey, these funny young men are coming and they’re not locked in and they’re going to insult you. They will parody you. They’ll make fun of you if you’re a politician, if you’re anything.”

In the film, the cast members are first introduced in a sequence that was captured in a single shot.

oh boy (sighed).

What was it like to be fair?

So I did this twice. We had two days of this to figure it out. It was crazy. When I first met with Jason after I got the job, I think he said he wanted to shoot the whole movie as one. the whole movie. You rehearse it for a month, then you spend five days and every day you shoot the movie. And I just thought, “Wow, boy, you’re on crack. What kind of drug are you taking, Jason? (laugh.) So he didn’t do that, but these singles were intense. These are like five, six minutes long, so if something comes up by itself, you have to start over from the beginning. At one point we had this meter running, now we’re on 12, 21, 23 and we were betting on whether we’d be over 30 or under 30. I remember we got to, I think we were taking 24, and Jason said that would be the last take and then we’re right at the end and a guy walks up and he’s supposed to say his line and I look him in the eye and he freezes and goes “oh shit,” and everyone burst out laughing because I was so almost It was a very, very intense day. You had a blade, you have different characters, this is your first opportunity to introduce yourself in this film. It was chaotic, but I give it to Jason. Jason shot the entire movie with stand-ins before we even got there. So he knew the choreography.

When you remember seeing Garrett SNLand was or is being on the show a goal for you?

Yes, SNL it’s a big goal for me. I auditioned for SNLI didn’t get it, which is fine. Full circle moment here. I had a second city background, improv background, sketch comedy, so, always, SNL it is a goal. In the same year I didn’t book it, I got it The New Girl. So I was very blessed to get to that show. Everything went. But I would say the first time I remember Garrett was a sketch for the hard of hearing (“News for the Hard of Hearing”) where he yelled everything the person was saying so the deaf could actually hear him. And Chico Escuela, where he was going, “baseball is really, really good to me.” I remember those sketches only in passing. And it was crazy, because I didn’t even realize I’d seen those sketches until after I got the part. Then I went back to see some of his old sketches and said, “Oh, I know that one.” “Oh, I know that one too.” It all started coming back to me.