Some sayings are known amongst friends: a line, a nickname, an inside joke, repeated religiously like a mantra. There are even some expressions recognized by an entire town, a city, a region, a state. And then there are those rare mottos that become familiar to a nation, so established in popular culture that they ring through our heads like a cereal commercial jingle. It takes seven words to transport us to New York City, Manhattan, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Studio 8H. We see a stage. On it? America’s wittiest. We watch them, live, for 90 spectacular minutes, and we laugh. Then comes that final, unmistakable line: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” 

Growing up on a farm in rural Parracombe, North Devon, English actress and singer-songwriter Ella Hunt had only the faintest idea of SNL from viral sketches posted online until she booked the role of Gilda Radner in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. The film tells the true story of Lorne Michaels and the original cast and crew of Saturday Night Live in the 90 chaotic minutes leading up to the first aired episode in 1975. The movie debuted at the Telluride Film Festival and was widely released this fall, aligning with SNL’s 50th anniversary season. 

Saturday Night is a culmination of humor and influence, a glance at the genesis of a show that paved the way for a new generation of publicized sketch-comedy, making Manhattan the capital of the comedic world. Hunt received the call confirming her role as Radner in a fashion that can best be described as wholly New York. “It was right before Christmas and I was in JFK queuing up to get on a plane and my agent called. I had told myself that if I didn’t get a call that evening, I should put it out of my head. I got the call, and I ran into a Hudson bookstore and I burst into tears.”

In the UK, Ella was raised amidst a family of creatives, her mother an actor and sculptor, and her father an art dealer. From a young age, her parents encouraged her to embrace each element of the creative process, not just the result or the prevalence of the project, and to find small moments of joy in every stage despite the many highs and lows of the entertainment industry. Hunt was first spotted by an agent when she was 11 years old, acting in her school’s rendition of The Mikado. She played Katisha, who she playfully refers to as “the baddie of the piece.”

“I remember I’d been really disappointed because I wasn’t cast as one of the three school girls,” she says. “I remember my mom saying, ‘Oh no, you’ve got the fun character. You can be funny,’ and I very vividly remember making people laugh, and it being the first time I’ve made people laugh on stage, and just going, ‘Oh my goodness, how do I do that again?’” Doubtlessly, Ella’s performance made every audience member chuckle that night, including the agent who signed and represented her until just a few years ago.

Beginning her professional career at 13, Hunt first appeared in the 2011 film Intruders, followed by Les Misérables (2012), and the independent film, Robot Overlords (2014). She made her television debut at 18 as Ellie Marsden alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones in the ITV series Cold Feet (2016), before starring in the zombie-musical, Anna and the Apocalypse (2017) as the titular role for which she was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA and won an ensemble award at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. Ella also played Mrs. Flint in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. At the age of 20, she permanently relocated to New York for her role as Sue Gilbert in Apple TV’s critically acclaimed Dickinson, which she starred in for all three seasons opposite Hailee Steinfeld. This summer, she appeared as Juliette Chesney in Kevin Costner’s feature saga Horizon: An American Saga-Chapter 1.

Apart from her career behind the camera, the actress is a successful singer-songwriter, having released her first single, “Magpie” in 2020 followed by two other singles. This past summer, she opened for her good friends Angus & Julia Stone, an Australian folk and indie pop group on their American tour. On the stage, Hunt feels almost holy, a rush of adrenaline flooding from the audience to her body, creating a wonderful sense of immediacy. The roles she plays on film often inspire her lyricism, and it was her musical ear that allowed her to take the daunting first step into Gilda Radner’s shoes. 

“I come from a music background, and voices are just my way into people. You learn so much about a person’s face and their movement through their voice, and Gilda’s voice especially.” Prior to shooting, Hunt worked with a dialect coach to perfect Gilda’s Detroit accent. During our Zoom interview, Ella leaps out of her chair and lopes around the room, demonstrating the way she practiced embodying Gilda’s unique physicality and speech, both of which, she says, are inseparable from the other. Taking on the unnerving task of becoming Gilda Radner is certainly no small feat. As a former member of the National Lampoon Radio Hour and a five-year SNL cast member, Radner was renowned for her unforgettable characters, into which she poured the entirety of her soul, including some of Ella’s favorites, Candy Slice (a satirical take on Patti Smith) and the recurring little girl, Judy Miller. Gilda was married to fellow comedian Gene Wilder until her death at age 42 of ovarian cancer. 

To research for the role, Hunt glued herself to her laptop, obsessively analyzing videos of Gilda’s sketches and watching the touching Love, Gilda documentary. She also spoke to one of Radner’s closest friends and key collaborators, Alan Zweibel, who grounded her in Gilda as a rounded human being, giving her a glance at Gilda behind the lens, and her relationship to performing. “Her practices are so vast. She was such a chameleon, and so able to use every element of her being for humor and also for kindness which I find really remarkable about her. I think so much of her comedy comes from a place of wanting to make people feel at ease.” When asked what makes something funny, Ella responds adamantly: “There’s a power in transparency. Vulnerability and darkness really lend themselves to comedy. Part of why Gilda was so beloved was her ability to be vulnerable and transparent. So much of her comedy was tapping into elements of her life that maybe were more challenging, like her relationship to food or her romantic relationships and her struggles there.” 

Saturday Night pays tribute not only to the genius minds of SNL’s founders such as Radner, but to New York—a sort of love letter to the city that never sleeps. “SNL is New York,” Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) says to NBC’s VP of Talent Relations (Willem Dafoe). It’s a crumpled ball of all the city’s ugliness and beauty, of that intangible allure that attracts millions of tourists every year to see the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, MoMA, to hear the screech of the subway as it leaves the station, to visit the man who sells the best bacon egg & cheese at the local bodega. 

As a current New Yorker herself, the city holds many meanings for Ella: “It means Cats. It means to-go coffee. It means all of my favorite creatives in one place. It’s a city that just kind of miraculously unfolded to me when I got here…I was able to try on so many different versions of myself in my first couple of years.” To the young actor, New York means freedom, the place where she found many members of her chosen family, but it’s also a landmark of her first night shooting Saturday Night at the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink. There, Gilda watches John Belushi (Matt Wood) skate beneath the golden statue of Prometheus, and asks, “Do you ever have nostalgia for a moment while you’re still living it?” Ella certainly did at that moment, filming that scene in that place. “I now think that I will always walk past Rockefeller Ice Rink and think about shooting that scene,” she says. 

Walking through New York, Ella spots dozens of past versions of herself in different parts of the city. But where is Ella Hunt going? She hopes to do many things. She wants to direct one day. She wants to continue devoting time to her family and friends. She would love to be in a Christopher Nolan-style sci-fi thriller, a musician biopic, or a piece in the realm of MaXXXine. She wants to travel to Japan, New Zealand, and the Bolivian Salt Flats. She wants to go on tour. Hunt shares that new music is forthcoming, a project she has been working on for the last year. When asked the intimidating question of what she wants her legacy to be, she responds with sureness. “I think it’s kind of an amazing time to be creative, to be a queer person, to be a woman. We’re seeing representation and a freedom of expression that maybe hasn’t been so possible before. I want to enjoy those freedoms.” 

Gilda Radner’s presence in her life has also touched Hunt’s personal legacy. “Something that I’ve noticed about Gilda is that she had this extraordinary spirit that has lived on long after her passing. It is a spirit of generosity and warmth and joy. Joy within her personal vulnerability and struggles. That really inspires me, and, certainly, I would love that to be a part of my personal legacy.” So where is Ella Hunt going? To set, to the stage, home to her family. Wherever it may be, she hopes there will be laughter.

Photographed by Sam Dameshek

Styled by Oliver Vaughn

Written by Emma Raff

Hair: Glen Oropoeza at The Prtnrs Agency

Makeup: Georgie Eisdell at The Wall Group

Nails: Ginger Lopez at Opus Beauty

Flaunt Film: Timothy Shin

Hair Assistant: Danielle Pavia

Production Assistant: Rocky Soto

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