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Bowen Yang is all smiles looking back at his first ever Saturday Night Live screen test after an interaction with Lorne Michaels.
In a recent appearance on Hot Ones, Yang recalled his disastrous first screen test for Saturday Night Live in 2017. He shared that he tried to connect with Lorne Michaels over their shared Canadian heritage, but it fell flat.
“The final step in that process is you have a one-on-one meeting with Lorne. It was him and another producer, Erik Kenward,” Yang said.
“The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘I’m Canadian, too. I grew up in Montreal. I grew up in Quebec’ — and immediately it was done, it was a vibe killer. I didn’t get the job because I had pandered to his Canadianness, and it was a disaster.”
The comedian elucidated that producer asked him to speak French and then relate it to Kenward about how French have great books.
He continued then he later learnt how to joke around show creators by Adi Bryant, when he later joined the show following year.
“Aidy Bryant was the one who told me, ‘You can be, like, friends with him now,’” Yang recalled.
“I think Lorne at one point was hanging out with Aidy and kind of chuckling about it like, ’I think Bowen sees me as a mountain to climb, and I don’t want him to think that anymore.’ That kind of gave me the encouragement I needed to go up to him and be like, ‘Oh, we can relate to each other on a human-to-human level,’ which I never thought would happen with him.”