Entertainment

Kenan Thompson Is Ready for His Close-Up on SNL

TAMPA, Fla. — There’s a side to Kenan Thompson that few “Saturday Night Live” viewers get to see, when he takes its stage, shortly before each 11:30 p.m. broadcast, to warm up the studio audience with his exuberant cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’.”

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Kenan Thompson Is Ready for His Close-Up on SNL
By
Dave Itzkoff
, New York Times

TAMPA, Fla. — There’s a side to Kenan Thompson that few “Saturday Night Live” viewers get to see, when he takes its stage, shortly before each 11:30 p.m. broadcast, to warm up the studio audience with his exuberant cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’.”

“It’s helped me feel like a pivotal presence there,” said Thompson, who this May completed his record-breaking 15th season on “SNL” “If the warm-up is off, the first couple minutes of the cold open are going to be off. It’s an important tone-setter.”

The rock ‘n’ roll ritual is the rare moment when Thompson will cut loose and allow himself to be the center of attention. Far more often, he can be seen on the show in key supporting roles. There are the eccentric characters who visit the “Weekend Update” desk (like the self-aggrandizing basketball patriarch LaVar Ball and an eerily upbeat neighbor named Willie) or the characters who hold together ensemble pieces (like the host of the fictional game show “Black Jeopardy!” and Steve Harvey, the MC of “Celebrity Family Feud”). Last month, his understated reliability helped earn him an Emmy Award nomination as a supporting actor in a comedy series, his first in that category.

Over a decade and a half on “SNL,” Thompson, 40, has grown to see himself as an integral part of this long-running entertainment franchise. But he had to get past his deeply ingrained modesty to achieve that recalibration.

“I feel like there’s less pressure and stress just hitting it and quitting it. Let me get in, get my laughs and then I’m out,” Thompson explained. “As far as being the guy, the star, the lead role of something, I didn’t necessarily need that.”

“Bring me in off the bench!” he added with a robust chuckle. “But to be a starter? To deal with the fact that, yeah, they need something from me every single week? I had to make that switch in my mind.”

On a July afternoon, a coolly confident Thompson was relaxing on an outdoor patio at a favorite restaurant here. He and his wife, Christina Evangeline, have been coming to Tampa in recent summers to enjoy the “SNL” offseason in relative tranquillity, though this day they were awaiting the imminent birth of their second child. Earlier that morning, the couple’s daughter Georgia, had put her hand on Evangeline’s pregnant belly and uttered a single word: “Today.” (In fact, her baby sister, Gianna, would be born four days later.)

By his own admission, Thompson was not so calm and collected when he joined “SNL” in fall 2003, despite an already robust resume.

He had already starred in a sketch show, “All That,” and a sitcom, “Kenan & Kel,” both on Nickelodeon, that brought him to the attention of Lorne Michaels, the “SNL” creator and executive producer.

“He grew up in a television studio and he grew up with this form,” Michaels said of Thompson. “He’s comfortable with it.”

But for Thompson, those first several years at “SNL” were fraught with anxiety and intimidation. Joining a troupe that then included Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon and Amy Poehler was disorienting. “I was a huge fan, and then to see myself on it, it just didn’t seem like the same show,” he said. “It was so weird and confusing.”

He added, “It was way too much pressure, almost, and I’ve seen that give people nervous breakdowns.”

Though Thompson landed offbeat roles in various sketches, he said this was largely thanks to the generosity of his cast mates. “I was wandering around, just waiting to be called on,” he said. “'Oh, you need a Carol Moseley Braun? I don’t have one, necessarily, but I’m willing to read these lines.’ That was my whole mentality.”

That philosophy, Thompson said, was likely shaped during his childhood in Atlanta, when he performed in the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble (a theater company now known as Youth Ensemble of Atlanta) and was happy to be a second-stringer.

In a rare instance when he played a lead role, as Christopher Columbus in a student musical that traveled to Spain in 1992, Thompson said he felt out of place. Though he can still recall precise details about his European travels, he said: “I can barely remember my time on stage at all. I just checked out.”

His attitude changed following film roles in “The Mighty Ducks” sequels and his many years at Nickelodeon, after which he thought a slot at “SNL” would practically be handed to him on a plate. But the show did not seek him out until summer 2003, after the departure of longtime cast member Tracy Morgan.

Thompson was hired that year alongside Finesse Mitchell and J.B. Smoove (who both left the show in 2006). As Thompson said with a laugh, “Once Tracy left, they felt like it was black audition time, I guess.”

Little by little, Thompson made a name for himself. The recurring roles he cited as personal breakthroughs included a hardened prison inmate in a Scared Straight program and the host of a perplexing BET talk show called “What Up With That?”

But colleagues continued to take note of his reticence.

“He would say something like, ‘Oh, you should write that for somebody else, not me,'” Bryan Tucker, an “SNL” head writer who joined the show in 2005, recalled. “Or I would suggest an idea and he would put himself in a smaller part, because he knew it would have a better chance of getting on if someone more popular was in a main part.”

It was only in recent years, after the departure of co-stars like Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg (who both left in 2012), that Thompson felt he could relax and take a lesson from these performers.

“I just realized that they were being their awesome, silly selves,” he said, “and working the way that they worked best.” But the increasing spotlight has sometimes been accompanied by unwanted attention, like in 2013, when in a TV Guide interview, he tried to account for the lack of black female cast members on “SNL.” “It’s just a tough part of the business,” he said in the interview. “Like in auditions, they just never find ones that are ready.”

Amid a wider debate about the lack of diversity at the show, Michaels held a series of casting sessions that led to the hiring of Sasheer Zamata (a cast member from 2014 to 2017) and Leslie Jones (who entered as a writer in 2014 and became a cast member later that year).

As Thompson later explained his remarks to The New Yorker, “What I said was that the show hadn’t found the right people. That was true. And at the end of the day, Leslie and Sasheer both got jobs, so I’m happy.”

Today, Thompson said he had benefited from a social shift, at “SNL” and in the world beyond it, as more black people attain positions of cultural prominence.

That dynamic had brought more black hosts to the show, resulting in more appearances for Thompson. (Tucker pointed out that, just this past season, “SNL” had featured seven black guest hosts — other years may have as few as two or three — which “usually does mean a better week for Kenan,” he said, even if it just meant playing “the brother or the dad” in a given sketch.)

Thompson explained that this broadened sensibility at the show meant more writers were attuned to the people he already pays attention to, the characters he wants to play and the statements he wants to make — all leading to better opportunities for him. “It’s a progressive thing,” he said. “Back in the day, the things that they were mimicking and everybody was familiar with, was a little more one-sided. Because it was just a more one-sided world. But now the world is so open, especially New York — of course the show had to progress and be able to reflect that.”

He cited sketches like “Black Jeopardy!,” which pokes fun at outsiders’ attempts — some more successful than others — to align themselves with black American culture. (When a white contestant played by Elizabeth Banks complains that she can’t do anything to win, Thompson’s character excitedly replies, “That is the blackest thing you’ve said all day!”)

Tucker said that Thompson’s abundant cheerfulness in these recurring segments was the likely source of their popularity.

“He’s just so good-natured inside,” Tucker said. “You can write something that’s somewhat controversial or might rub people the wrong way, but because he’s saying it, people take it a lot easier, because they know there’s no malice behind it.”

He also pointed to a recent segment where Thompson, his co-star Chris Redd and the guest host, Donald Glover, played a quarreling hip-hop trio modeled on Migos, an Atlanta group that performed on the show a few weeks earlier.

“Those kinds of sketches would have been harder to have on the show five years ago,” Tucker said, “where now the culture is changing and our writing staff is a little younger and hipper, and will put out those ideas and there’s an open door for them.”

That he currently does not have a regular role in the show’s weekly parodies of the Trump administration, Thompson said, did not bother him. “Those guys aren’t really that interesting,” he said. “If there’s nothing jolly about someone, I can’t really play them.”

Now that he has spent this long at “Saturday Night Live,” could Thompson, who surpassed Darrell Hammond (now the show’s announcer) last season, theoretically stay there indefinitely? Michaels put him in the same league as “SNL” alumni like Dana Carvey, Bill Hader and Wiig, who he said were perfectly suited for sketch comedy.

“There are people who are fully realized in this form,” Michaels said. “It uses all of their talent — their ability to create characters, be funny and be in the moment — and goes to all of their strengths, and those people should be there forever.”

More wistfully, Michaels said he gives the same advice to all his cast members: “Build a bridge to the next thing, and when it’s solid enough, walk across it.”

Thompson said that a day would inevitably come when he, too, would pack up his “SNL” office for the last time, though he has nothing specific in mind for his next act.

“I would love to just stay there forever and retire on it,” he said. But whether he remains for one, five or 10 more seasons, he added, “it’s going to happen. It’ll be a personal, gray-hair moment: ‘That was that chapter of my life.’ You have to close it. I’m young, and I still want to do other things.” Thompson said he could not imagine an experience better than the one he’s had at “SNL” Whether on another TV show or a film, he said, “you do three months of a project and you say goodbye to people. It’s not as fun as being overworked and exhausted but around people that you really love.”

Far away from the glare of the show and the impending results of Emmy voting, Thompson felt free to be the main attraction at this table for two. He sipped his drink in the afternoon sun and declared this to be his “greatest summer ever.” The biggest crisis facing him was the prospect of running out of the bread and appetizers that were in front of him.

But even that was not really much of an emergency.

“We can always order more,” he said. “This is America.”

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