“You’re like, ‘What the hell, man?
He ain’t got no job.
Is that the storyline now?'”
Lamorne Morris in ‘New Girl’.FOX Image Collection via Getty
He ain’t got no job.
Is that the storyline now?'"
“It’s not easy to develop characters for a television series.
Lamorne Morris, Max Greenfield, Zooey Deschanel, Jake Johnson, and Hannah Simone of ‘New Girl’.Alexei Hay/FOX
What is happening over here?'”
“I don’t know.
But damn, there’s 100-something people y’all hired, and ain’t nobody Black but me!”
Lamorne Morris in ‘Saturday Night,’ Garrett Morris.Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures; Fred Hermansky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty
He continues, “I don’t want to say it’s nefarious.
You are like, ‘Oh, who am I talking to then?
Does anybody live in the hood?
Anybody around here understand what I’m talking about?
None of y’all got a Black uncle?
So I feel like Garrett and I shared a very, very similar walk in that regard.”
“Jason didn’t want us to reach out to the real actors,” he says.
“His thing was, you’re an actor.
You know what I mean?
What’s that like?
So he wants us to really focus on that.
But I called Garrett anyway and had multiple conversations with Garrett.
I hung out with Garrett.
I presented him an award at the [American Black Film Festival].”
Morris wanted to verify that Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan depicted Garrett accurately in their screenplay.
“A lot of my preparation was making sure Garrett got his message across,” he says.
He said, ‘Just play it honestly.’
And so that’s it."
“You don’t have to ask him anything,” he recalls.
“He just tells you a million stories, and they’re all funny and they’re all poignant.
A lot of ‘em have a lot of deep meaning behind it.
This man has lived one hell of a life.
He is almost 90.
So that definitely helped me get into character, too.”
Saturday Nightis now playing in theaters.
