A Wild & Crazy ‘SNL’ 50th Season: Wigs, Stars & Will Ferrell’s Shorts
Four behind-the-scenes Emmy nominees reveal what was really going on backstage during the anniversary season
Happy Monday, everyone, and thanks to those of you who already joined us at our paid tier, Prestige Junkie After Party, and caught our debut bonus podcast episode last Friday. I have heard from several of you that my lighting gave a real Vaseline-on-the-lens, sun-kissed glow effect, and I can report that I’ve put my best lighting engineers on the case to replicate whatever happened there for all future videos. As a journalist who started my career before Instagram existed, this video-first era is a lot to take in, but I know that nice lighting is at least 50 percent of the battle.
My compatriot Christopher Rosen will be back again this Friday on After Party’s Substack Live, catching up on the news of the week, the state of the Emmy race as phase 2 campaigning kicks off, and, as always, our hot takes that we won’t share anywhere else. Join us at 9 a.m. PT on Friday for a Substack Live — Chris will be reporting in from L.A. after moderating our Art & Crafts LIVE event on Thursday (Angelenos can request to attend here) — and some guaranteed gossip. For just $5 a month, you can become an After Party subscriber and go behind the velvet rope.
Meanwhile! Today, I’m sharing here the conversation I had when I hopped on Zoom with four Emmy nominees who have made Saturday Night Live a juggernaut, even though you’ve never seen them on camera. This past year, they not only carried on with their regular work on the weekly live shows, but spent months preparing for February’s 50th anniversary event — a three-hour spectacular, which, as they tell me, required them to throw out a lot of the rule book of what they know about making the show.
Or as veteran show hairstylist Jodi Mancuso put it to me, “I’ve been there a long time, and this one kicked my ass.”
Live From New York
On Feb. 16, Saturday Night Live’s Studio 8H was crammed with some of the most famous people on earth, most of them sitting in bleachers that filled up the already-tight space. And it was director Liz Patrick’s job to figure out how to get around them.
“I put handheld cameras on sticks, because we were right up against the bleachers, right up against the audience,” Patrick remembers of the jam-packed night, for which she’s received an Emmy nomination for directing a variety special. Her job was to capture all the action onstage, like she does for many regular Saturday Night Live episodes, but not block the view of a massive audience that included the likes of Steven Spielberg, Sarah Jessica Parker and Cher. Patrick and her camera crew are accustomed to the weekly challenge of putting on a live comedy show, but the special was something else entirely. “They did an amazing job just moving from one sketch to another, which was a hard feat out there with limited space.”
Among the Emmy-nominated Saturday Night Live crew members I gathered on Zoom last week, Patrick calls herself the baby — she’s only been a director on the show for four seasons, taking over for the legendary SNL director Don Roy King in 2021 and winning Emmys for her work on the series in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, production designer Keith Raywood, nominated for his work on the Lady Gaga episode this season as well as the anniversary homecoming concert, has been with the show since 1988. Makeup artist Louie Zakarian, double-nominated this year for both the anniversary special and a regular season episode, joined the show in 1999, followed seven years later by hairstylist Jodi Mancuso, nominated for the anniversary special. Together, this foursome has decades of institutional knowledge — not to mention multiple Emmys, as all four have won several times for the NBC show. (This year they’re among the 31 total nominations for Saturday Night Live as a whole — not a bad haul for a show many decades into its run.) So heading into the 50th anniversary special, particularly for everyone who was around for the 40th anniversary show, it was clear what they didn’t want to do again.
One huge challenge of the anniversary specials is that the audience isn’t just observers — many of them, from Jon Hamm to Meryl Streep, would be pulled onstage for a sketch. For the 40th, says Mancuso, “Those quick changes of grabbing people and getting them in and out were not as simple, and we had a lot of trouble — we weren’t prepared. This one, I feel like we did much better.”
A general rule for any Saturday Night Live episode is that no matter how much you prep, there are going to be last-minute changes. The stakes were even higher for the anniversary special, especially since SNL50 didn’t have the night-of live dress rehearsal that’s typical before every regular episode of the show. So when Will Ferrell was added at the last minute to the “Scared Straight” sketch, for example, Patrick had to change her entire camera setup moments before the show began. As she puts it, “I didn’t know he was going to be coming out in short shorts, and like, I have to show it.”
Ferrell was at least present for the rehearsals in the days leading up to the special, unlike some of the other guest stars who jumped onstage for the first time live during the broadcast. But even the SNL veteran’s presence before the special didn’t provide the production team with the complete picture of his vision. “He did come into the rehearsal, but not wearing short shorts and not wearing a wig,” Mancuso says. “I was never told that he needed a red wig. Our lovely Colin Jost (the show’s former head writer and Weekend Update co-host) swears that he told everybody, but that was not something that I was told, and Will is not the easiest fit. So that wig, I had to dye literally 10 minutes before the show started.”
“Scared Straight,” like most of the sketches on the anniversary special — including “Bronx Beat” with Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph, “Black Jeopardy” with Kenan Thompson, Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan and Eddie Murphy, and “Lawrence Welk” with Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen — was an audience favorite from SNL seasons past. Though most of the crew I spoke with don’t watch the episodes after the show airs, they had a sense of which sketches might return for the special and tried to plan accordingly.
“I prepared for as many characters as I could possibly think of that would come back, but we didn’t know until the week before what sketches we were going to do,” says Zakarian. “That anniversary show was basically two episodes wrapped into one.”
And like any regular episode of SNL, some sketches were fully prepped and written that never made it to air. One excised sketch involved “many, many political people and characters,” according to Mancuso, but nobody was ever sure it would actually make it to air. “It was painful, and we prepared for it,” Mancuso adds. “I had maybe over 20 wigs in it that just never happened.”
For production designer Raywood, the weekend was even more of a marathon — he was also responsible for the sets for SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, a three-hour event that took place at Radio City Music Hall two days before the anniversary special and featured appearances by Miley Cyrus, Lauryn Hill, Eddie Vedder, Bad Bunny, Jack White and Post Malone with the surviving members of Nirvana (Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear).
“I started designing for these specials literally exactly a year ago, while I was here, where I am now, in Spain,” says Raywood, who kindly called in from his vacation in Mallorca. “The Radio City concert was a brand-new show; it wasn’t walking into a studio that was set up for us.”
As they worked on the regular season episodes that led up to the special, says Raywood, their work was often business as usual — at least, as “usual” as it can be on the frantic SNL schedule. “There wasn't a difference on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday when we're getting ready for a regular show,” Raywood continues. “But I think all of us were aware, and Lorne [Michaels] was very aware, that this was an important year. There was a certain kind of — I don't want to call it pressure. It was more like an elevated awareness that this was coming.”
Hail to the Chief
The anniversary special was so all-consuming that it’s easy to forget the crew also had gone through an election year season, with former SNL stars like Dana Carvey and Maya Rudolph stopping by regularly to play Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. (Carvey also appeared as Elon Musk, an impression that Musk predictably didn’t love.) As Raywood puts it, “There was something leading up to the special that already felt special.”
It was also a regular season episode that earned Zakarian his third nomination in the category for outstanding prosthetic makeup, which is not necessarily the place you’d expect SNL, with its tight timelines and quick changes, to be competitive. (Zakarian has several nominations and wins in the non-prosthetic makeup category.) But for December’s Timothée Chalamet-hosted episode, Zakarian was charged with turning most of the main cast into dogs — with some help from Mancuso’s wig department as well.
“Everybody had to be dogs, but then cast member Sarah Sherman had to be an old lady five minutes later, so it was ripping off a dog face and putting on old lady cheeks,” says Zakarian, a vivid description of something he’s become very accustomed to over the years. “Most of the time with prosthetics, you have weeks to figure it all out. We’ve got a day or two to build it, and sometimes minutes to put it on.”
But Zakarian describes the whole process as fun, as do all of his colleagues when talking about the insane challenges they faced throughout a very, very busy season. It will be another 10 years before they have to plan another massive anniversary special, and as Mancuso puts it, “Let’s put the cards on the table, none of us are going to be here for another 50.” (“Speak for yourself,” Raywood chimes in.) Mancuso continues, “No matter when you started, if it was four years ago or you were there from the beginning — this was all our baby.”
But it’s a baby they might be eager to not see for a little while. As Zakarian says, “By the end of that anniversary show, I think everybody was just spent.”
