Lorne Michaels maintains that Shane Gillis would have been good for Saturday Night Live
Lorne Michaels thinks the controversy around his 2019 hiring of Shane Gillis was a "stunning" "overreaction"
Photo by: Stephane Cardinale - Corbis; Jamie McCarthy
It’s been a big week for Shane Gillis, and he didn’t even have to lift a finger for it. Earlier this week, he was featured as a supporting player in The New Yorker‘s profile of Bowen Yang, as the two were both hired as featured players on Saturday Night Live at the same time. But Gillis was fired almost immediately after critics resurfaced offensive jokes, including the use of slurs against Asian people. Now we’re getting the same story from SNL boss Lorne Michaels’ perspective in a new interview from The Hollywood Reporter.
Asked if he’s more concerned about being politically correct now than when the show started in 1975, Michaels reflected on The Shane Gillis Incident as an example. “We had a bad time when I added Shane Gillis to the cast [in 2019]. He got beat up for things that he’d done years earlier [racist and homophobic jokes] and the overreaction to it was so stunning — and the velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show,” Michaels recalled. “It became a scandal and I go, ‘No, no, he’s just starting and he’s really funny and you don’t know how we’re going to use him.'”