Jim Carrey is set to play Joe Biden in the upcoming season of Saturday Night Live as the NBC show adds three new featured players and will have a limited studio audience when it returns.
The show will feature Carrey most likely as Biden. Michaels, speaking in an interview with Vulture, said, “Maya Rudolph is coming back, and Alec [Baldwin] will be back. And I think Jim Carrey is going to do Biden.”
“There was some interest on his part. And then we responded, obviously, positively. But it came down to discussions about what the take was. He and Colin Jost had a bunch of talks. He and I as well. He will give the part energy and strength, and … [Laughs.] Hopefully it’s funny,” Michaels added.
Joining are Lauren Holt, an actor, comedian, singer and improvise, who was a house performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Los Angeles, Punkie Johnson, a comedian and writer who has worked on Space Force and Corporate and Andrew Dismukes, who has served as an SNL staff writer since season 43.
This comes as Michaels, the seasoned exec producer of the long-running NBC comedy variety show revealed that it would have a limited audience when it returns to Studio 8H on October 3.
This comes as some other shows, including HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, have been experimenting with small groups of audience members.
“We need the audience, obviously. With comedy, when you don’t hear the response, it’s just different. With the kind of comedy we do, which quite often is broad, timing gets thrown off without an audience. And for me, what is most important is when you’re absolutely certain of some piece on Wednesday, and then the dress-rehearsal audience sees it on Saturday and tells you you’re wrong. . . .I think us coming back and accomplishing the show will lead to — I hate to use the word normalcy — but it’s a thing that is part of our lives coming back, in whatever form it ends up coming back. So the physical problems of doing it — number of people who can be in the studio, number of people who can be in the control room, how you separate the band so that they’re not in any jeopardy — all of those are part of the meetings we’ve been having,” Michaels added.
Elsewhere, the show has also added Anna Drezen as a head writer. She has been on the show since 2016.
Earlier this week, NBC revealed that the entire cast of season 45, including Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Cecily Strong and Kenan Thompson would return.
This season featured player Ego Nwodim was upped to a repertory player for this upcoming season, whose group consists of Beck Bennett, Aidy Bryant, Michael Che, Pete Davidson, Mikey Day, Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, Colin Jost, Kate McKinnon, Alex Moffat, Kyle Mooney, Chris Redd, Cecily Strong, Kenan Thompson, Melissa Villaseñor and Bowen Yang.
Separately, the show has created the SNL Scholarship Program to fund a scholarship program for students of diverse backgrounds to advance their comedy careers. It has partnered with comedy schools The Pit, The Second City, The Groundlings and UCB on this.
Saturday Night Live is produced by Broadway Video in association with SNL Studios with Lorne Michaels as executive producer.