{"id":91155,"date":"2025-08-25T07:44:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T07:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/91155\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T07:44:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T07:44:13","slug":"saturday-night-shakeup-snl-creator-lorne-michaels-teases-big-changes-ahead-of-season-51-premiere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/91155\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night \u2018shakeup\u2019! SNL creator Lorne Michaels teases big changes ahead of season 51 premiere"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Saturday Night Live<\/a> creator Lorne Michaels<\/a> is making some changes to the cast of the long-running sketch comedy program <\/a>this season.<\/p>\n

Asked in a recent interview with Puck <\/a>if he was going to \u201cshake things up\u201d for season 51 after there weren’t any major cast departures following the show\u2019s 50th season finale, Michaels, 80, said \u201cyes.\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast season, when we were at the party of the first show, quarter of four in the morning, Dana [Carvey, who played Joe Biden] comes over to me and says, \u2018I don\u2019t think anyone knows you called me June 4th [to play Biden],\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted people coming back and being part of [the 50th season],\u201d he added. \u201cSo when Kate [McKinnon] hosted, Kristen [Wiig] and Maya [Rudolph] came back for it. And that meant there couldn\u2019t be those kind of disruptions [to the cast], or anything that was going to take the focus off [the 50th season]. And we had an election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked whether he felt \u201cpressured to reinvent this season,\u201d Michaels said he does.<\/p>\n

\"LorneLorne Michaels says changes to the next season \u2018SNL\u2019 cast will be announced \u2018next week\u2019 (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, for sure,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be announced in a week or so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he didn\u2019t say who could be leaving and entering the season 51 cast, he did confirm that James Austin Johnson will remain on the show, reprising his role as President Donald Trump. <\/p>\n

SNL\u2019s 50th season included cast members Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, Marcello Hernandez, Michael Longfellow, Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson, Bowen Yang, Devon Walker, and Weekend Update co-hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost. <\/p>\n

Featured players Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline also joined the cast last year.<\/p>\n

The 51 season premiere airs on NBC Saturday, October 4.<\/p>\n

Each episode of the season will feature a different celebrity host and musical guest, who have yet to be announced. <\/p>\n

After five decades of creating the show, Michaels said he doesn\u2019t have any plans to retire or leave NBC. \u201cI may be wrong. But I don\u2019t feel I\u2019m done,\u201d he told The New York Times<\/a> in February. <\/p>\n

During the interview with Puck, Michaels acknowledged that he\u2019s answered the retirement questions \u201cmany times.\u201d However, he did share that throughout the next season, he\u2019s going to give his colleagues some more responsibilities. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s already been happening [in] the past year or so,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore people are involved in the choices and in the decisions. But I\u2019m not worried about A.I. because A.I. can\u2019t guess what I\u2019m gonna do between 10 and 11 [on show nights] \u2026 because I have no idea!\u201d he explained. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people in that room with a lot of opinions. I make the final decision, obviously. But it\u2019s not as if people don\u2019t let me know how strongly they feel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-91155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}