Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night’s first trailer

These days, we might know Saturday Night Live as a funny, (usually) well-oiled machine, but the legendary show’s first night was more akin to something ripped from a Christopher Nolan film. At least that’s how the 90 minutes leading up to showtime look in the hands of director Jason Reitman, whose highly-anticipated Saturday Night finally dropped its first trailer today. 

One of the first things you notice in Saturday Night’s trailer is the clock. “They have 90 minutes to get their shit together,” reads the film’s logline, which serves as the endpoint of hundreds of interviews conducted by Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan with almost every living member of that first episode’s cast and crew. This trailer is tense, fully living up to the director’s description of the film as a “thriller-comedy” in an interview with Vanity Fair earlier this week. “It doesn’t matter that we’re ready, it matters that it’s 11:30. That’s when we go on,” says The Fabelman’s Gabriel Labelle—playing a young and flustered Lorne Michaels—to Cooper Hoffman’s Dick Ebersol, NBC’s then-VP of Late Night Programming.

That, of course, brings us to the other immediately salient aspect of this trailer: the casting. We’ve been writing for months now about the insane cadre of stars from all corners of the industry—everyone from Nicholas Braun to Willem Dafoe to MUNA’s Naomi McPherson—brought in to play the then-unknowns who would go on to become some comedy’s biggest titans. (There’s a great joke in here about the announcer not knowing how to pronounce Dan Aykroyd’s last name.) 

Well, this writer is pleased to admit that the casting is largely pretty astounding. Sure, 21-year-old Labelle looks a little goofy as the man in charge of it all (Reitman recently explained that the choice was to emphasize the fact that we’re meeting Michaels “as he’s still forming”), but everyone else—with special nods to Dylan O’Brien as Aykroyd, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, and Finn Wolfhard as a perfectly cast NBC Page—looks stunningly like their characters. 

You might not believe it, but Saturday Night also stars Matthew Rhys, Nicholas Braun, Rachel Sennott, Ella Hunt, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Tommy Dewey, and J.K. Simmons. We really can’t overemphasize the enormity of this cast. You’ll be able to watch them live (on film) October 11 in theaters.