Saturday Night Live Finally Has Its First Latina Cast Member
Today, Saturday Night Live announced that they’ve hired three new cast members for their upcoming 43rd season. Mikey Day, a longtime writer for the show will be promoted to featured player, along with Alex Moffat and Melissa Villaseñor.
Day had a recurring role on Maya & Marty, another NBC sketch series from Lorne Michaels over the summer. According to Deadline, this was a test to see if he was ready to join the SNL cast. Moffat is from Chicago, where he performed at Second City, Annoyance, and Improv Olympic.
Villaseñor is an impressionist who got her TV start when she performed on the sixth season of NBC’s America’s Got Talent. She wowed the judges with her spot-on Kathy Griffin, Barbara Walters, and Miley Cyrus, and made it to the semifinals.
She has also done voice-over work on Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, Family Guy, and Comedy Central’s Trip Tank.
It’s worth noting that Villaseñor is the first Latina cast member in the show’s entire history. According to the Huffington Post, it’s been a few years coming. In 2013, the National Hispanic Foundation sent Michaels a letter saying that in the show’s 39 year tenure, Horatio Sanz was the only principal Latino cast member to ever appear on the show, and his time ended in 2006.
The letter was sent on the heels of a different diversity controversy. SNL is known for having casts full of white men, and in October of 2013 Jay Pharaoh spoke out saying that needed to change, and that the show needed to hire a black female cast member. Less than one month later, Kerry Washington did a sketch where she played Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyoncé all at once because there was no one else to play the other black women. Later that season Sasheer Zamata was hired.
We hope that SNL’s diversity push lasts, and we also can’t wait to see the impressions Villaseñor brings to the show. During an election year, the show relies heavily on politics and cast members often play real people. Given the state of the 2016 election, we can’t imagine this year will be any different. Why would the writers want to do extra work when the comedy writes itself?
The new cast members will be filling the spaces left by Taran Killam, Jay Pharaoh, and Jon Rudnitsky, who will not be returning to the show this season.
[image via screen grab/NBC]
[H/T Vanity Fair]
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