SNL 50: Did Lorne Michaels Try Getting Shane Gillis to Play Trump? (2025)

Posted in: NBC, Peacock, TV | Tagged: saturday night live, snl

Did SNL EP Lorne Michaels offer Shane Gillis the Donald Trump role for Season 50? We're hoping that's a bad Gillis joke and not a reality.

WithNBC's Saturday Night Live Season 50 now underway, SNL's "election team" is firmly in place: VP Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph), husband, Douglas Emhoff(Andy Samberg), Gov. Tim Walz (Jim Gaffigan), Sen. JD Vance (Bowen Yang), PresidentJoseph Biden (Dana Carvey), and Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson). While much of the summer was spent pushing to make sure that Rudolph would be returning and speculating over who could play Walz and Vance, one bit of potential news that almost flew under the wire was EP Lorne Michaels implying during an interview that SNL may need to "reinvent" its Trump impersonation. Thankfully, smarter heads prevailed, and Johnson returned – the best all-around Trump impersonator that SNL has ever had (that's right). But was Michaels interested in replacing Johnson – and was Shane Gillis the one Michaels wanted to take over?

To understand the controversy surrounding Gillis and SNL – which was ignited again when Gillis was selected to host the February 24th episode of Season 49 – you need to go back to 2019. That's when Gillis was officially announced as joining the SNL cast – only for the long-running sketch comedy/music series to part ways with Gillis days after recordings of racist, sexist, and homophobic comments surfaced as part of a YouTube channel called Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast.

"After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL. We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as a comedian and his impressive audition for SNL," shared a spokesperson for Michaels regarding the decision at the time. "We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier and that our vetting process was not up to our standard."

Five years later, Michaels would welcome Gillis back to host and has been speaking fondly of Gillis, claiming that the pushback that Gillis received back in 2019 was an "overreaction." It's some interesting background to keep in mind, with reports from over this past weekend that Gillis claimed he was offered the role of Trump for Season 50 but turned it down. During an event at the Las Vegas comedy festival Skankfest, podcast host Luis J. Gomez shared that no one was expecting Gillis to attend this year's festival. When told to "explain why" by Gillis, Gomez added, "Because he was offered to play Trump on the entire season of SNL, and he turned it down to f**king be here, folks." Gillis followed that up with, "They said, 'Are you serious? You're going to say no?' I said, 'Lorne, I've got to go to Coke Magic.'" We're hoping that Gillis was joking because any one of Johnson's Trump personas would best what Gillis has to offer – and we're not sure Gillis should be "promoted" for what was (at best) a mediocre show that's best sketch was Cut for Time and released online after.