Willem Dafoe Is Something Of An Executive As David Tebet In 'SNL 1975'
Jesus Christ there are so many people involved in this production
His Poor Things co-star Ramy Youssef has been working all week on his Saturday Night Live hosting debut, but Willem Dafoe has set his return to the world of Studio 8H as the next announced cast member for Jason Reitman’s SNL 1975, as it is so working under. The film chronicles the behind-the-scenes chaos leading up to the October 11, 1975 premiere of the NBC sketch comedy series.
Dafoe will be playing David Tebet, a press agent turned network executive, namely well into a 20-year tenure as NBC’s Vice President of talent relations from 1959 to 1979. He was the network’s recruiter, with his most touted recruit being Johnny Carson to The Tonight Show, an early lasting success on his resume. He would then start Carson Productions and leave in 1993, dying from stroke complications at 91 in 2005, just a few months after Carson himself.
As for Dafoe, he is widely known as Norman Osborn, aka Green Goblin, in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy and reprised the role in Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was still in theaters in January 2022 he hosted Saturday Night Live itself for the first time with Katy Perry as his musical guest. He is the second announced 1975 cast member to have achieved the feat after Spider-Man co-star J. K. Simmons, who hosted in January 2015 and will be playing Milton Berle. Apt for Easter weekend, one of his most acclaimed roles was as Jesus Christ in The Last Temptation of Christ, which quickly became a staple for the season. His other credits include Born on the Fourth of July, Existenz, The Boondock Saints, Finding Nemo, John Wick, and Aquaman. He continues to be busy, lately appearing in The Northman, Asteroid City, Inside, and The Boy and the Heron, and this year alone he teams with Yorgos Lanthimos again for Kinds of Kindness, which will release in June, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in September, and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu on Christmas.
With Gabriel LaBelle as creator Lorne Michaels, SNL 1975 stars include Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Matt Wood as John Belushi, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, and Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, as well as Nicholas Braun as either Jim Henson (as reported) or Andy Kaufman (as spotted), Taylor Gray and Mcabe Gregg as Al Franken and Tom Davis as far as onscreen non-cast talent for those early years, with Nicholas Podany as almost-onscreen but still-future cast member Billy Crystal. It also managed to grab Stranger Things father and son Joe Chrest and Finn Wolfhard, who have also worked with Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan on their recent Ghostbusters films. Just Thursday, it was reported that musician Jon Batiste would not only be scoring the film, but playing Billy Preston. Bottoms’s Kaia Gerber and Rachel Sennott each have roles, playing Chase’s then-girlfriend Jacqueline Carlin and Michaels's then-wife, Rosie Shuster, one of the show's writers, respectively.
The film’s script is based on an extensive series of interviews they conducted with all surviving cast, writers, and crew. It is also part of Reitman and Kenan’s overall production deal with Sony Pictures. They produce with Jason Blumenfeld and Peter Rice, while Erica Mills and Joann Perritano are executive producers.