Saturday Night’s Jason Reitman Explains Why Nicholas Braun Has 2 Roles in the Movie

Jason Reitman has an explanation as to why Nicholas Braun is playing two different roles in Saturday Night.

Saturday Night will be released in United States theaters nationwide this coming October. The movie, which is about the 1975 premiere of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, is directed by Reitman and stars Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, and Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol.

Braun, who is best known for playing Gregory Hirsch in HBO’s Succession, plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson in the movie. Kaufman was initially going to be played by Benny Safdie; however, Safdie dropped out of the project due to scheduling projects.

Why is Nicholas Braun playing two different roles in Saturday Night?

Speaking to IndieWire, Reitman explained why they decided to have Braun play both Kaufman and Henson in the film.

“We wrote Jim Henson for Nick. We would just sit there in the room saying things like, ‘F*** rags for rent,’ and imagine Nicholas Braun saying it and be like, ‘This is going to be great.’ Benny Safdie was actually supposed to play Andy Kaufman, and Benny became unavailable because his film got green-lit, this one he just finished directing. As we kept on thinking about who would be right for Andy Kaufman, we just kept on coming back to Nicholas Braun. And then we thought, ‘Well, yeah, on SNL, you can play more than one character.’

“What’s crazy to me is how many people have no idea that it’s the same actor. Nicholas Braun fans obviously know, but I’ve had plenty of people ask me what actors played those two roles.”

The cast of Saturday Night also includes Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Matt Wood as John Belushi, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Willem Dafoe as David Tebet, Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, and more.

Saturday Night will get a limited theatrical release in the United States on September 27, 2024, from Sony Pictures Releasing. It will then be released nationwide on October 11, 2024.

Brandon Schreur

Brandon Schreur has been writing about comics, movies, television shows, and all things pop culture for roughly five years. He's a lifelong cinephile who spends way, way too much money buying Blu-rays and trade paperbacks. You can find him on twitter at @brandonschreur.