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‘SNL’s Lorne Michaels agreed to appear in a documentary, then tried to vanish

April 13, 2026

Lorne Michaels has been a public figure since he created “Saturday Night Live” a half-century ago.

And he has managed to do it without really letting the public into his life. (Did you know he’s married, with kids, and has a house in Maine?) Now 81 and still the head honcho at “SNL,” Michaels has finally allowed us a peek behind the curtain… kind of.

In Morgan Neville’s new documentary, “Lorne,” the subject is skittish about being the subject and tries his best to avoid revealing too much. Neville takes us backstage to writers’ meetings, read-throughs, rehearsals and interviews.

The film features a parade of writers, producers and more familiar faces: Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Andy Samberg, Michael Che, Colin Jost, John Mulaney and long-time friends Steve Martin and Paul Simon. But ultimately, Neville builds his entire film around the fact that Lorne is hiding in plain sight, generating laughs about this quirky Oz-like character.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Last time we spoke, you’d just worked with U2 and David Letterman and were planning films about Steve Martin and Paul McCartney. You were essentially talking to people you wanted to talk to when you were in high school. Where does Lorne Michaels fit in?

My dad was a big comedy nerd; he had the neighborhood’s first Betamax, and recorded “SNL” in the first season, so while people say “their” cast was from their high school days, mine was that first cast. My dad even took me to see the Blues Brothers live. I had an SNL scrapbook Rolling Stone put out in 1979, and bought the backstage history that came out in ’86. I still have my receipt from that.

Q. Martin, McCartney, and Michaels are famously guarded emotionally. How did Lorne compare to the previous two?

Steve was private, but he has been in therapy long enough and is increasingly good at talking about himself. I felt Paul was processing something about the ‘70s in our interviews. But I realized right away that Lorne is not that type of person; he’s not the narrator of his own story. He speaks in anecdotes and little philosophical insights. He’s like a cipher, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. People put all kinds of weight on what he says, but what he really thinks people can never guess.

Q. You ended up using his elusiveness as a framework. Did you plan that from the start?

Day one of shooting, the moment the cameras came out, Lorne vanished. My first reaction was, “What the hell is happening?” I thought he was pulling a prank because we’d had good conversations beforehand. But with the cameras out, he became an endangered species. He mostly wouldn’t wear a microphone, so we wired his office with 12 microphones.

One of his good friends said to me, “There’s nobody that really wants a film made about them more than him, and nobody who really doesn’t want to make a film made about them more than him.”

So I started to think, “This is part of what the film is, it’s the story under the story.”

Q. You interviewed many “SNL” people. Were there any favorites? And any you couldn’t get?

John Mulaney is a real student of Lorne. He’s a friend and a mentee, but I got the sense that when he’s with Lorne, he’s asking questions and taking notes. He studies Lorne and cares about him. I’d interviewed him and then told him I was going to do a round table [with Bill Hader, Andy Samberg and Fred Armisen], and he said, “Oh, I want to do that, too.” It’s a shared experience for them, and they really do like talking about Lorne.

Dan Aykroyd was one person who wouldn’t do it. I don’t know why other than him saying he was burnt-out on doing documentary interviews. And Jane Curtin said she felt like she didn’t know Lorne at all, that she was always the most distant from him at the show.

Q. We don’t hear Lorne reflect on criticisms: his initial reaction to Sinead O’Connor or the accusations of tokenism in the cast, or booking Elon Musk or Donald Trump in 2015. Did he not want to discuss it?

I asked him about all those things. But the hard part about Lorne is that he won’t give you a straight answer. He’ll tell you a story instead, saying, “Well, you understand that Trump was on the cover of every magazine right then.”

I think people ascribe a lot more intention to Lorne about the casting or hosts, thinking he’s sitting back, making all these big decisions. I don’t think he’s thinking, “I’m trying to put my hand on the scale of the culture in a certain way.” I think he’s so in the trenches that he’s just trying to get a show on this weekend and thinking who would be a good host.

Q. Do you feel like you got to know Lorne in the end?

I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what’s important to him and what motivates him and where his intentions are. For all he’s perceived as a tough power broker, I get the sense that he thinks he’s always juggling five plates and just trying to keep it together, managing up to handle the networks or sponsors or trying to keep people in the cast.

He does feel like he’s looking out for people with the best intentions, even if they don’t know it. He doesn’t feel he’s just pointing his finger and making decisions. I think he feels like he works really hard in a thousand invisible ways to kind of keep it together.

He says, “If I do my job well, it’s invisible.” And I wonder if that’s why he made this film.

Orange County Register

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‘SNL’s Lorne Michaels agreed to appear in a documentary, then tried to vanish

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