As much excellence as we see onscreen on “Saturday Night Live,” which just wrapped its historic 50th season, some of the best stories from the cast and crew, that illuminate how much work goes into making the weekly late night staple, are about the sketches or parts of sketches that got cut.
Take the viral “Maybelline” sketch for example, with a trio of performers including host Ariana Grande doing their best Jennifer Coolidge impression. During a USG University Panel featuring Hair Department Head Jodi Mancuso, Makeup Department Head Louie Zakarian, and cast member Chloe Fineman (who is in the sketch,) “Saturday Night Live” director Liz Patrick revealed that there was supposed to be a fourth Jennifer Coolidge in the scene. “Sarah [Sherman] was in there also,” she said, describing the first draft of “Maybelline” she’d read. “I was like, ‘Oh my god. How are we gonna do four people?’ But I was open and ready for the challenge.”
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The panelists all agree: Being “open and ready for the challenge” is the kind of ethos always needed to get the job done for “SNL,” even if they don’t know exactly how yet at a particular moment. “It’s just flying by the seat of your [pants],” said Fineman. “I was remembering last year I did JoJo Siwa on ‘Weekend Update,’ and that was so much crazy makeup that we created, and then had an immediate, quick change. So you’re putting it on, and then you’re fully washing your face, and then fully putting the new thing on. And then we did the same thing … You can’t even think about it. You’re just going, and it is like this weird dance that we all just do because everyone’s so expert and truly at the top of their game. It’s beautiful.”
Building off of that example that Fineman laid out, makeup designer Zakarian explains, “We can’t use makeups that are going to stay on and take too long to take off. So everything has to be planned out for ‘Ok, we need to be able to do it as fast as [it] possibly can be done, because we never know what’s going to happen from dress to air.” He adds, “You find out that, ‘Oh, I had 10 minutes here, now I’ve only got five minutes to do that same thing that took us 10 minutes to get into’ is a big, big challenge.”
For hair and wig designer Mancuso, a memorable battle that she had against the clock working on Season 50 was when she got a call at 1:00am the day before the show that Mikey Day’s character in the cold open had been replaced by Devon Walker playing country star Shaboozey, meaning they were now in need of an intricate wig to match the “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” singer’s unique dread pattern. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, man, this beautiful man’s big dreads. How am I doing this?’ And for the first time, I said to one of our writers, Bryan Tucker, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’” she said. “And he came to my room and he was like, ‘Do I have to cut this?’ And who wants to be that person? ‘The wig department can’t figure it out.’ And we pulled it off, and it was so beautiful. And of course, it got cut, but we made it happen!”
To hear Fineman, Patrick, Mancuso, and Zakarian talk more about the craft that went into making “Saturday Night Live” Season 50, watch IndieWire’s full interview with them above.
“Saturday Night Live” Season 50 is now streaming on Peacock.IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of virtual panels celebrating the best in television art from the 2024-2025 TV season across NBC Universal’s portfolio of shows. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking. Catch up on the latest USG University videos hereor directly at the USG University site.
