‘I Was Angry’: Lorne Michaels Says He Opposed Decision to Fire Shane Gillis

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Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels has some regrets — and one of them was not getting comedian Shane Gillis to stay on the show as a cast member.

Back in 2019, Gillis was hired to join the cast, but when it was revealed that he said several racial slurs during a number of podcast appearances, the backlash was too much for NBC executives to stomach. Michaels explained to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that he was not one of those executives, and the decision to withdraw their offer to Gillis made him “angry”:

“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels recalls. “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 had lots of experience in defending the show over things that happened on air — the O.J. Simpson jokes that made Norm Macdonald an enemy of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer; Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope; polarizing hosts from Andrew Dice Clay to Trump — but with Gillis, the speed and force of the viral backlash couldn’t be contained.

NBC made the call to fire Gillis, Michaels says. “That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.”

The WSJ wrote that Michaels kept in touch with Gillis, whose career as a standup exploded after the casting kerfuffle. Gillis was invited to host the show in February and received mixed reviews.