The Hollywood Reporter announced that five-time Grammy winner Jon Batiste has joined Jason Reitman’s SNL 1975, a film set to chronicle the original broadcast of Saturday Night Live. The film was written by Reitman and Gil Kenan from information gathered in interviews with the living cast and crew of that original broadcast.
Batiste is set to play Billy Preston, SNL’s very first musical guest. Preston was a famous singer and keyboardist who passed away in 2006. Batiste is also set to compose the musical score for SNL 1975, following his Academy Award for composing Pixar’s Soul in 2020. He was also nominated for “It Never Went Away,” from American Symphony, a biographical documentary about his career, at this year’s Oscars. Batiste served as a bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert for seven seasons. He has found recent, more mainstream, musical success in the last few years with albums like “WE ARE” and “World Music Radio,” his seventh studio album.
Batiste joins a cast including Gabriel LaBelle (who plays SNL creator Lorne Michaels), Cooper Hoffman (NBC executive Dick Ebersol), and Rachel Sennott (SNL Writer and Michaels’ ex-wife Rosie Shuster).
Additionally, many big names have joined the film to portray the original SNL cast members. These include Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Matt Wood as John Belushi, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman and Kim Matula as Jane Curtin. Other stars appear as famous SNL crew members, such as Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson, Kaia Gerber as Jacqueline Carlin, and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle. Finn Wolfhard, who stars in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a film written by Reitman, will play an NBC Page in SNL 1975. Andrew Barth Feldman has also been cast.
Surely, more actors will join the enormous ensemble as SNL 1975 continues filming.
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