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.
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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.
I watched Fletch I don’t know how many times. It was on Netflix while I was prepping, and I wish I could just ask Netflix to look at my account and tell me how many times Fletch played because I had it on repeat. I’m cooking dinner, Fletch is on. I’m getting ready for bed, Fletch is on. I just started making a list of all of his little tics and bits and body movements—like, when he blinks to emphasize a joke or not. I started panicking after a while where I’m like, “I’m not there yet. I’m not there yet,” and it was close to filming.
You played the Riddler for many years on Gotham, a network TV series. You don’t get much preparation time on those kinds of shows. Did you find that frustrating?
Did I find it frustrating? Yes. We were doing 22 episodes a year in about nine to 10 months. When you’re dealing with a show on the scale of Gotham with a lot of characters, it’s a lot to balance every character’s storyline and to really attend to it in a way that it deserves…. But we had showrunners that I grew to be very comfortable with, and they allowed me to participate in expressing my feelings on what could change or how things could work better.
There was an episode called “How the Riddler Got His Name.” It was season three, episode 15, and from the first draft of that, I just was kind of honest about how, structurally, the motivation of the Riddler in that episode should be adjusted. John Stephens, the showrunner, had a conversation with me about it. I argued my case, and he just said, “You’re right.” And then we went on Thanksgiving break, and he spent his Thanksgiving break rewriting this episode—an incredible act of generosity and collaboration. I’m like, “I’ve waited two and a half seasons for this moment. I want it to be as great as it possibly can.” The show ended up being so impactful and empowering to me because I really got a voice. We made 100 episodes of television. I had my training ground there.
In May December, I only have a few scenes, but as an actor, I’m looking at a larger canvas and understanding what my job is on that canvas. There are only so many strokes of the brush that I’m adding, but I feel like I’m pretty good at understanding how those can help Natalie [Portman]. My job is to come in and change her trajectory, and I like doing that. It was Gotham and being part of this big ensemble that really helped me understand, “This is how you come in and change the weather of this moment.”
For Saturday Night, I assume you didn’t speak with Chevy?
I did not. Generally, Jason was discouraging any of us doing that. I would love to meet him and tell him it was an honor, because it is. Growing up, he was one of the comedic actors that I really loved and looked up to. Him and Bill Murray and Jim Carrey were the guys for me. So that would just be really nice to be able to pay respects to him. But there’s so much material out there for me to reference, and I tried to do two things. I felt like there were two things that had to happen here. One, you have to create a version of this man that is recognizable to the general public who knows him based off of the performances that are beloved. And then the real work is to show this other side of Chevy that people don’t see. We all know him as charismatic and confident, but in this, his arc is very much about his ego being crushed. We need to see a young man who’s not a star yet, who isn’t validated. And he needs to be nervous and vulnerable and humiliated at a certain point.
I would imagine that’s something you could connect to, as someone who was very afraid of failure in taking on the part.
100%. The Chevy in this film is far closer to me than the Chevy that everyone knows and loves. It’s someone who’s taking a big risk doing that show—a live comedy show, a brand of comedy that he’s very responsible for as a writer on the show and as an actor.
Acting is such a strange thing. It’s like your nervous system doesn’t know that you’re not experiencing something. It is a little messed up, to be honest with you, but that’s the work. You live in these scenes, you experience them in a real sense on camera so it feels real for the audience, and your body remembers these things. So these characters become very real. You have memories of doing these scenes. I can sometimes get really emotional thinking about the bravery of Varian Fry [in the Netflix limited series Transatlantic] and the people that he saved and what that meant, and how some of those people that he saved changed our culture in the mid-20th century.
That makes me think of Olive Kitteridge, the first project I’d ever seen you in. You’re playing a suicidal young man and have to act out a devastating scene opposite Frances McDormand.
It was overwhelming. It was my second job on camera, and they took a real risk on me. Laura Rosenthal was the casting director of that, and she became a real champion for me. She works with Todd Haynes, and the third job I was hired for was Carol; she really vouched for me with Todd because of Olive Kitteridge, and Lisa Cholodenko directed that.
Frances is playing a sharp character and, arguably, the kindest we ever see her is the way she treats my character, Kevin Coulson. They really wanted to see how warm she came across in that scene, so they knew how harsh they could go with her. We spent three days in the car because we had to reshoot; it was supposed to be a really windy day, and in all of her coverage, there was foliage in the background that wasn’t windy enough. We ended up shooting her coverage twice.
Did that experience leave a big impression on you, since it really launched your screen career?
Kevin Coulson is a character that lives very deeply inside of me. I have an extremely strong, vivid sense-memory of that car: the color of the car, the way the DP walked, the way it was covered and lit. Frances would get in and out of the car and I really just sat in that car by myself almost all day for three days, except to eat. But otherwise, I really stayed in that car by myself for a while. That was the first time where I felt like I was in control of my emotional life as an actor and a sensitive person, that I was able to sort of flex in and out of this, that I was understanding the way that I needed to use my body and my emotions and environment to sustain something.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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