“ Saturday Night Live ” creator and producer Lorne Michaels is speaking out on his recent show regrets. The NBC Universal mega-producer told The Wall Street Journal that he was “angry” that NBC executives opted to fire comedian Shane Gillis from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019. Gillis was announced as a cast member but never appeared on the series; he was let go after his racially-insensitive comments about Asian people that he made on a podcast were resurfaced.
He used the slur “ch*nks” saying, “Chinatown’s f*cking nuts. Let the f*cking ch*nks live there.” The now-deleted video from 2018 was from his podcast “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast.
” The video was recirculated right as “SNL” announced Bowen Yang was to become the first Asian-American cast member. Gillis later made his hosting debut in February 2024 during Season 49. “He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels said.
“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 added that he disagreed with the decision of NBC to fire Gillis.
“That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side,” he said, “but I understood it.” As part of the 50th anniversary coverage, Michaels also recently told The Hollywood Reporter that Gillis “got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier and.
