Gabriel LaBelle Goes for the Laughs in ‘Saturday Night’
Growing up in Vancouver, Gabriel LaBelle would spend every Saturday night seated in front of the TV with his brother and parents, watching “Saturday Night Live.”
“There was a family who we spent a lot of time with who had boys the same age as my brother and I, and we would watch all the ‘National Lampoon’ stuff, all the John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray films, and I grew up with the ‘Best of Will Farrell,’ ‘Best of Chris Farley’ VHS tapes,” LaBelle says. “It was always part of our household.”
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The 22-year-old now brings to life the creator of “SNL,” Lorne Michaels, in Jason Reitman’s new movie “Saturday Night,” about the making of the first episode of “SNL” in 1975.
“What’s so great about ‘SNL’ is that it’s a big collective,” LaBelle says. “It’s one of the only few television shows or movies or any form of content that everybody is watching, and it’s so reflective of the present and its satire is one of the few remaining collective things that everyone still watches.”
It’s been a rapid rise for the Vancouver native, who burst onto the scene in the 2022 film “The Fabelmans,” playing the character based on Steven Speilberg. He was in London for the premiere of “The Fabelmans” when he learned that Reitman wanted to meet him for coffee. The director was working on “Ghostbusters” at the time but told LaBelle about his next project, about the origins of “SNL” and its original cast.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, that sounds awesome.’ And he played it really cool. He was like, ‘Yeah, I’m just trying to meet as many young actors as I can, get a feel of who I could cast,’” LaBelle remembers.
Several months later, the team reached out about the part of Michaels. LaBelle booked a flight to New York so he could do his audition in person, crashing on a friend’s couch.
“It was the best $800 round trip to New York I’ve ever had,” he says.
He read as much as he could about Michaels, and had the opportunity to meet him when the cast was invited to attend a taping of the show last season, when Josh Brolin hosted in March.
“He invited us up and kind of gave us his blessing and encouragement for the movie, and that was really special,” LaBelle says.
Though the “SNL” he was watching as a kid was more recent than the cast portrayed in the movie — Chase, Aykroyd, Belushi, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Rosie Shuster and Billy Crystal are all characters — LaBelle was well versed in that era of comedy.
“I love comedy and I love listening to interviews of comedians and actors talk about their heroes. The early and the mid-’70s have been mythologized. It was such a genesis for our culture today,” he says. “I’ve always been enamored by that era.”
He got the acting bug when he was 8 after attending a theater camp, which he proceeded to attend every summer from then on.
“And that was it,” he says.
Since the success of “The Fabelmans,” which landed him the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer, he’s signed with CAA and has felt “the trajectory of my personal and creative life” change.
His next roles are still under wraps, but he’s eager to continue working with the industry’s prominent writers and directors. In the meantime, it’s all about getting people to go see his new movie.
“It really feels like, because it’s meant so much to me growing up, like I can give back a little bit to them,” he says of “SNL.” “I think I was making this for the people who’ve worked on the show. I wanted to get this right and to get Lorne right for them, all the cast and writers and people who’ve known him and who’ve inspired me along the way.”
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