Minor spoilers below.
Saturday Night is a thrill to watch. It yanks you right into the action before Saturday Night Live’s first broadcast, alongside a young, determined (and maybe a bit delusional) Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he faces one obstacle after another to get his now-famous show on air. As he zips around studio 8H, where he attempts to appease confused actors and skeptical studio execs alike, a nostalgia feast ensues: There’s John Belushi (Matt Wood) in his famous bee costume; in another scene, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) takes his seat as the Weekend Update anchor; even Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany), who was cut from the episode, rehearses a famous bit. It’s exciting to point out references you remember and familiar faces you know, but once the excitement wears off, you start to realize that the women of SNL are missing from most of the on-screen action.
Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt)—a comedy legend like her peers Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) and Belushi—wasn’t given nearly as much emotional material to work with in the film. (Although she does get to be carried up in a crane?) Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) got to bond with Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) about whether they belong on the show, but Laraine Newman’s (Emily Fairn) biggest challenge was whether she could change her costumes quickly enough between sets. Writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), thankfully, gets a spotlight for her integral work behind the scenes of SNL, for which she created some of the franchise’s most famous sketches. Her arc is about getting her due credit—but what about the rest of the real-life women behind the show?
This has been a recurring criticism of Saturday Night, with some saying it “shamefully fails” Radner, that director and co-writer Jason Reitman “loses track of women’s autonomy,” and that the three women characters in the cast “get the least to do.” SNL has been known to be male-dominated, especially in its early years (remember what Belushi infamously said about women not being funny?), and the film seems to only continue that tradition. Yes, we can acknowledge that the actresses might not have the same renown as Chase or Aykroyd, but if the film is about showing the unknown stories of SNL’s beginnings, perhaps women should’ve been a bigger part of Saturday Night, too.
In an attempt to remedy that error, let’s take a closer look at the women depicted in the film—and the stories Saturday Night omitted.
Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt)
Comedic legend Gilda Radner is portrayed by English actress Ella Hunt, perhaps best known as Sue Gilbert in Dickinson. Although Radner passed away in 1989, Hunt researched through watching the late comedian’s work and by talking with her collaborator and SNL writer Alan Zweibel. “I got to speak to someone really wonderful about a person that they loved, and I got to take elements of the conversation I had with Alan into the shoot, and I got to be influenced by Alan’s sensibility,” she told Who What Wear.
Radner was the first person Lorne Michaels cast on SNL, and she stayed on through its fifth season. The actress originally hailed from Detroit, Michigan, then studied theater at the University of Michigan, and later moved to Toronto, where Michaels saw her work in Godspell and in the comedy theater known as The Second City. “I felt there was a remarkable quality to her, a goodness which came through whatever she was doing,” he said of Radner, per The New York Times.
Looking back on the first season with the cast, Radner told WPBA-Atlanta’s Cinema Showcase in 1986, “The show wasn’t famous, we weren’t anybody, and we weren’t that good, not in the first couple years.”
Radner delivered famous SNL characters like the rambling Weekend Update correspondent Roseanne Roseannadanna, the charmingly misinformed Emily Litella (“nevermind!”), and her Barbara Walters parody, Baba Wawa. She won an Emmy and earned four nominations. She would later make her Broadway debut with a show featuring her famous SNL characters, and star in films like First Family and The Woman in Red. She married Gene Wilder in 1984.
She told Cinema Showcase of her characters, like Litella (who’s based on a woman who raised her), “They’re in a drawer in my house.” She continued, “I’ve outgrown, I think, certain of my characters since they’ve come from adolescence…They came from inside me, they’ll always be inside me, but they’re growing up with me.”
Radner was diagnosed with cancer in 1986. She writes in her book, Always Something: “Suddenly I had to spend all my time getting well. I was fighting for my life against cancer, a more lethal foe than even the interior decorator.” But she hoped her story would “help others who live in the world of medication and uncertainty.”
Radner died of ovarian cancer in 1989 at the age of 42. Her old friend and SNL co-star Dan Aykroyd released a statement upon her death, saying, “I loved her like a sister,” according to her New York Times obituary.
Given her legendary status, Radner surprisingly gets limited screen time on Saturday Night, even though her fellow—pointedly, male—pioneers Chase, Belushi, and Aykroyd get bigger storylines. Still, she has influenced so many women in comedy today, including SNL alum Tina Fey, who called Radner “our equivalent to Michelle Obama…She was so lovely, and she was also so authentically herself and so regular in so many ways.”
“The most important thing is to work, even after you have fame, even after you have success…I always feel like I was found rather than I went out and sought my career,” Radner told Cinema Showcase.
Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn)
Fairn, a British actress, has appeared in Black Mirror, Mary & George, and The Responder. Like her fellow actresses, she wasn’t given much to work with in Saturday Night.
She plays Laraine Newman, originally from California, who was a founding member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, whose later members included Will Ferrell and Maya Rudolph, according to NBC. Lorne Michaels hired her for SNL after her work on Lily Tomlin’s special, she told The New York Times. As a cast member, at age 23, Newman would hear how SNL wasn’t destined to succeed. “We were made aware that it was a graveyard shift and that this was a new thing, and it would be surprising if anybody was watching us,” she told the Times. “So we really felt kind of unobserved.”
But eventually, the actors reached star status. Michaels told Rolling Stone, “As individuals became more popular, people wanted to see more of them. The very fact that Danny and Bill and Garrett and John and Laraine were in a piece added something more to it.”
Newman told Vulture that while she “envied” Radner’s success and Jane Curtin’s Weekend Update post, they weren’t competitive with one another. “I knew we all did different things, so I never felt I was competing with them, and I’m sure they didn’t feel they were competing with me. Girls can be so mean, but we all came from a sketch background, and so we all supported one another,” she said.
While promoting her memoir in 2021, Newman didn’t bash the show’s male-dominated environment while speaking to the AP. “With regard to our shows, we had 13 writers—three women, 10 men—and it was a meritocracy,” she said. “No matter what people say. Lorne was very egalitarian with what went on the show. It was what was funny. It doesn’t matter who wrote it, who was in it. But the sensibility that the show gained with Tina Fey as the head writer….It became more female-centric, probably, because they had a lot more female writers.”
Newman was on SNL from 1975 to 1980. She went on to appear in films like Conehead, with fellow SNL alums, and also took on voice acting roles, including those in Oswald, As Told By Ginger, Up, Cars, and many more. Her children followed in her comedic footsteps: Spike Einbender, a comedian; and Hannah Einbeinder, star of Hacks.
Newman was flattered by the portrayal in Saturday Night. “Honored to have this brilliant actor play me,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I’ve kept silent after seeing the SNL movie because honestly, I don’t know how to express my feelings on it. I can say it’s thoroughly entertaining-heart pounding, brilliantly written, directed and the actors are all superb.”
Jane Curtin (Kim Matula)
You might’ve seen Matula on TV shows like UnREAL or the soap The Bold and the Beautiful, in which she played Hope Logan. In Saturday Night, she’s Jane Curtin, known as the “Queen of Deadpan,” who broke out in the Boston-based improv group The Proposition. While she was in theatrical productions and commercials prior, it was during her stint in The Proposition that she auditioned for Saturday Night Live.
As she remembers it, she didn’t have anything prepared when she came in to audition, so she was told to come back with some material. “So I left the room, and I was looking in my purse for something, and there was a script that I had written with someone else for a CBS audition tape,” she told The New Yorker. “It [was] a two-person sketch. And I went running back in going, ‘I have something! I found it in my purse!’ Gilda [Radner] was kind enough to read it with me.”
The film Saturday Night shows Curtin as unsure of her place in the production, often bonding with Garrett Morris over feeling like outsiders. In reality, Curtin wasn’t sure of how to get material for herself, which she credits to her shy disposition. She told The New York Times, “I was quiet and nobody paid any attention to me,” she said. “I didn’t know how to pitch. I had never had to do that in my life.”
But Curtin, who was on the show from 1975 to 1980, landed a pretty big role as the first woman to host Weekend Update, succeeding Chevy Chase. She co-anchored with Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray. She was also in the Coneheads sketch and its subsequent movie adaptation. After SNL, she nabbed big TV roles in Kate & Allie and 3rd Rock from the Sun. More recently, she’s been in The Good Fight and the CBS drama Unforgettable. Just last year, she was in the film Jules and made a cameo in Pete Davidson’s show Bupkis.
She did have some trouble with John Belushi while he was struggling with a drug addiction. “I got along with everyone,” she told People last year. “But I did have problems with John. But that was because John wasn’t John. He was an addict.”
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey several years ago, Curtain detailed the misogyny on set in the early days of SNL. Elaborating to The New Yorker in 2019, she said, “I had not been exposed to people who thought women were just not inherently funny.” She added that Belushi told her that to her face “several times.” “I said, ‘Yeah, O.K. Whatever.’ I’m not a fighter,” she recalled.
But she did have fond memories looking back on her favorite sketch: “I think doing ‘The Nerds’ with Gilda and Bill Murray was the most fun, just because it was so goofy and silly.”
Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott)
Sennott, from Shiva Baby, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and Bottoms, plays writer and producer Rosie Shuster. Shuster was childhood friends with Michaels, and they were married in 1971 and divorced in 1980, according to People. Rosie’s father, Frank Shuster, was considered a comedy mentor to Michaels.
“We did comedy sketches together at high school, summer camp, and college,” Shuster said of her former partner in a 2018 interview with The Neighborhood News. They also worked together for the CBC and with Lily Tomlin before coming to New York for SNL.
If Saturday Night depicted Michaels as the crazy genius behind the show, Shuster is its secret weapon, knowing how to talk to talent and step in for important creative decisions. In truth, Shuster was integral to SNL’s legacy, although she doesn’t have Michaels’s name recognition. She wrote popular sketches, like “The Hard Hats,” and helped create Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character, she told The Neighborhood News. She worked on SNL for the first five years and was “on and off through the ’80s.”
“We really did have to break a lot of glass ceilings because guys talk to each other and it was difficult for a woman to insert a female point of view into the conversation,” Shushter told The Neighborhood News. “Now there are a lot of strong women in comedy, but in those days there weren’t.”
Saturday Night attempts to give Shuster her due credit, showing how Senott’s character was integral to production. One part of the film is about how she wanted to be credited on the show, whether she would use her own last name or Michaels’s. As the Los Angeles Times reports, she was credited in different ways, including “Rosie ‘Bud’ Michaels,” “Rosie Apple,” and “Rosie Shuster.”
Sennott did get to chat with the woman she’d emulate. “I spoke to Rosie, which was amazing,” Sennott told The Hollywood Reporter. “I got to hear her voice and her laugh. I was like, ‘So were you freaking out [on the night of Oct. 11, 1975]?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, we knew it was a big deal, but also we didn’t.’” Sennott also noticed that Reitman and Kenan’s script “used words or phrases that she said in real life, so that was very cool.”
Shuster went on to write for and produce Gilda Live, Radner’s Broadway show—which was released as a film—and produced for The Carol Burnett Show. She has won two Emmys.
Jacqueline Carlin (Kaia Gerber)
After appearing in last year’s Bottoms, model Kaia Gerber continues to beef up her acting resume with Saturday Night, where she plays the late actress Jaqueline Carlin. Like Gerber, the real-life actress started with a modeling career and went on to make appearances in Saturday Night Live (the “New Dad” sketch), The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and the film Thank God It’s Friday.
She married Chevy Chase in 1976, and they formally divorced in 1980, according to Deadline. She died from cancer on July 1, 2021. She was 78 years old.
Valri Bromfield (Corinne Britti)
Canadian comedian Valri Bromfield wasn’t an original SNL cast member, but she did appear in the first episode, becoming the first woman to perform stand-up on the show. She delivered a two-minute monologue, which was said to be cut down from five minutes, as the film shows.
Bromfield had her start in a comedy team with Aykroyd, who was on SNL from 1975 to 1979, and also joined Second City. Aykroyd recalled to Esquire, “I met a woman named Valri Bromfield in high school, and she said, ‘You’re not going to be a prison guard. You’re coming with me to Toronto.’ And she dragged me off with our audition tape that we’d made on cable TV in Ottawa. It got the attention of Lorne Michaels.”
Michaels, however, had also worked with Bromfield on The Lily Tomlin Special, which he produced and she performed in. “He never played the bro game,” Bromfield told The New York Times of the SNL creator. “He could always manage what was the manic environment of the performers, which was like dropping a jar of ants on the floor.”
Still, Bromfield didn’t stick around on SNL; she told the Times that the kind of comedy she was used to doing didn’t translate to television “because there was such a strange, bland process that absolutely watered down anything you did.” She worked with Michaels on TV again in the short-lived The New Show, another variety comedy series. (The cast included Jeff Goldblum and Steve Martin.) Like SNL in its early days, The New Show had a hard-to-grasp concept at first. “You enter into his world of danger,” Bromfield told the CBC of Michaels. “Television is for here and now. That’s why he loves live TV.”
She appeared in more TV and film, including Mr. Mom opposite Michael Keaton, and Needful Things. She was also a writer on the Rosie O’Donnell Show.
Corinne Britti, who plays Bromfield in Saturday Night, is also a comedian. She has a live comedy show called Almost Therapy.
Janis Ian (Naomi McPherson)
Yes, that is Naomi from MUNA. The musician makes a short cameo as singer-songwriter Janis Ian, who starts performing after an awkward moment during the SNL dress rehearsal.
Ian and Billy Preston were the first musical guests on the SNL. Ian performed songs “At Seventeen” and “In the Winter,” according to NBC, but she didn’t reveal until this year that she was ill at the time of the performance. She had a 104-degree fever and strep throat, Ian told
The New York Times. At the time, she was in the midst of heavily promoting her album, Between the Lines. (“At Seventeen,” which earned her a Grammy and topped the Billboard 200 list, appears on that record.) She was just a few years out from releasing her self-titled debut and single “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking).”
Looking back, Ian told the Times that SNL “has become so different from anything anyone could remotely have envisioned. Nobody thought anything could last this long. But it’s mythic now, and I look very smart.”
Joan Carbunkle (Catherine Curtin)
Joan, a censor from NBC’s standards department tasked with surveying SNL scripts, is based on multiple women who held the real-life job, Reitman told Time. “Multiple people told me about trying to hide things in the script to see what she would notice,” the director said.
In the film, the very religious Joan butts heads with the writers, especially Michael O’Donoghue, over the language in the script. Years into SNL, Lorne Michaels opened up about the censoring process to the Washington Post in 1987. “It used to be more of a fight,” he said. “Now it’s just a flat ‘no.’”
You might recognize the actress playing Joan, Catherine Curtin, from a number of TV roles, but most notably as Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black.
Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. She was previously an editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com. There is a 75 percent chance she’s listening to Lorde right now.