Cory Michael Smith has mostly played vulnerable men in dramas like 1985 and May December. So he had plenty of reason to doubt his ability to land the part of the wisecracking and often swaggering Chevy Chase in Jason Reitman’s comedy Saturday Night, which chronicles the first live show of Saturday Night Live in 1975.
“I did not foresee myself being cast in this,” Smith, 37, tells THR. “The [audition] process just kept going, and in my head I’m like, ‘There’s no way that I’m the best person for this.’ ”
Smith eventually would land the part, tasked with inhabiting one of the most colorful members of that kaleidoscopic inaugural class of SNL. It filled him with anxiety.
“I was both elated and horrified that I was going to do this because it’s a big, exciting film that multiple generations care about,” he says. “They care about this institution. They know these actors. And so the responsibility truly felt heavy and daunting.”
Smith leaned into that responsibility. For two months, he watched no narrative material that wasn’t about Chase and jotted down the actor’s tics and mannerisms in a spreadsheet that he would then later apply to his scenes in the script. “I guess it’s like learning a language,” he says. Looking at photos of Chase and the rest of the cast and how they dressed also helped Smith prepare for the role, as did reading books about the show’s environment.
He also watched the first season of SNL over and over again to learn the style and look from that era. “The feel and colors of that first season are so different from today,” he notes. “Today, it’s like a really bright, shiny production. Back then, it was grays and browns and muted colors, and it felt really dingy, and you can really feel the way New York has changed.” Reitman, who co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan, also suggested the cast watch certain films, specifically those by Fletch director Michael Ritchie, which, according to Smith, are great displays of natural behavior.
His preparation to play Chase gave him the confidence to bring ideas to Reitman about his character, which he says the director was very receptive to. “I was writing jokes and improving jokes in a way that I just never have in my life,” says Smith, who was heavily involved in musical theater growing up in Ohio and who made his Broadway debut in 2013. “The whole opening sequence where he’s interviewing me and asking about the ensemble, and I say, ‘Is this an ensemble?’ That wasn’t scripted but became a very important thing and an important identifier of Chevy and his state of mind.”
When Chase in one scene meets executives in the green room and performs a stand-up set, Reitman had written a few jokes as a jumping-off point. But Smith brought his own six or seven jokes to set that day, some of which ended up making the final cut. “A lot of our early conversations were about how we’re not looking for the best imitator of Chevy Chase,” Reitman told THR ahead of the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Each character has one very core piece of essence that we’re looking for. In Chevy Chase, it’s the ego that needs to be humbled.”
That humility proved to be Smith’s greatest challenge. The actor says that he was most nervous for his scene with J.K. Simmons, who plays Milton Berle in the film. In the scene, Berle is hitting on Chase’s girlfriend, played by Kaia Gerber, and is confronted by Chase, who then gets told by Berle that he is nothing.
“I was nervous about it because it felt the most unfamiliar to how we know Chevy Chase,” says Smith. “It’s easy to look back at his work and try to identify his confidence and charisma — he has a real sort of quiet power and swagger about him — but it’s rare to see him humiliated.” To tap into the humiliation, Smith leaned on the one video he could find of Chase in a similar state of mind: The first time he was on Johnny Carson’s show in 1977, he was embarrassed by Carson right at the start of the segment. “He tries to recover, but it’s so painful. It’s really one of the only times I could find true humiliation with Chevy.”
While Matt Wood, who plays John Belushi in the movie, was “intentionally quite reclusive from everyone because of the nature of his role,” Smith became good friends with another co-star, Dylan O’Brien (who actually called Smith during this interview). O’Brien plays Dan Aykroyd in the movie.
“This was such a large cast, the probability of there being at least one asshole was fairly high, but everyone was so great,” says Smith. “Everybody showed up taking this so seriously and having done a lot of prep because no one wanted to fuck it up. We didn’t want to mess up our careers by failing in our tribute to beloved actors. So there was a real spirit of an attempt toward excellence.” (Saturday Night stars a roster of young talent, including Gabriel LaBelle, Ella Hunt, Rachel Sennott, Lamorne Morris and Nicholas Braun.)
Smith, whose film credits include Carol and First Man and TV credits include Transatlantic and Olive Kitteridge, just wrapped filming Joachim Trier’s internationally minded drama Sentimental Value alongside Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning. But he hopes to do more comedy. “I feel like I taste-tested this,” he says.
He says that he also learned the value of studying tape. “When I’ve created characters in the past, I’ve maybe taken inspiration from people in my past to imbue some quality into characters, but I’ve never sat and watched other performances to develop my own. I enjoyed doing that here, and I think in the future I might toy around with taking some inspiration from very specific people and performances.”
This story first appeared in a November stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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