Gabriel LaBelle Is On the Cusp of Something Great (2024)

You know, if I could bottle up one thing in this world, it’d be Gabriel LaBelle’s charisma. It’s a genuine but goddamn juiced level of charm, like Mr. Rogers after seventeen shots of espresso or Keanu Reeves greeting a corgi. I witness it about three minutes into dinner. We’re in the back of a midtown Manhattan restaurant called the Elgin, and he’s wearing a plaid button-down with an undershirt cut so low that I’m exposed to the most chest hair I’ve ever seen on a twenty-two-year-old man who isn't myself. The hairdo is a wonderful, curly mop, and he welcomes our waitress with so much warmth that I’m convinced he flew all 2,469 miles from Los Angeles for this one moment. “How are you?!” he asks, his tone so familiar and welcoming I’m half expecting him to follow up with “It’s been years!”

She’s doing just great. It’s a Monday night in late September and she’s got an off-menu item—a wrap with grilled shrimp, avocado, pico de gallo, lettuce, and chipotle mayo with a side of potatoes—that sounds great, too, but LaBelle must decline. He’s built like a fire hydrant with a six-pack, and maintenance calls for the kale-and-avocado salad, topped with salmon. “I love how she said it was her wrap,” says LaBelle, hunched forward like he’s about to spill major government secrets. “Like she was making it herself. It’s like the Hailey Bieber smoothie but with Elgin wraps.”

So LaBelle is funny, too, I’m gleaning, in this Seinfeldian, observational, Gen Z sort of way. I’ll learn more about him, like his fearlessness of rats and short-lived but illustrious football career, and that he self-reflects as if he were a ninety-six-year-old man looking back on his life from his deathbed—but we’re not there yet.

Considering he’s someone who has already conquered two once-in-a-career roles, we know surprisingly little about Gabriel LaBelle. Aside from a few interviews, it’s just his Wikipedia page, which hilariously notes a childhood role in Shrek the Musical, and his IMDb profile. In 2022, he fronted Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical flim The Fabelmans. He played a teenage Spielberg analog—an aspiring filmmaker named Sammy Fabelman—with such gravitas that he won a Critics Choice Award for Best Young Performer. Shortly after, he embodied Jon Bernthal’s younger counterpart in American Gigolo, then a Linklaterian antihero named Moose (Moose!) in this year’s criminally underappreciated coming-of-age comedy Snack Shack. And there’s the reason why we’re contemplating wraps at the Elgin: It just so happens to sit a block away from 30 Rock, where Saturday Night Live is filmed. Next up, LaBelle stars as a younger version of SNL creator Lorne Michaels in a new film called Saturday Night (out nationwide this Friday), which tracks the ninety batshit minutes before NBC’s celebrated sketch-comedy show aired its first episode.

If The Fabelmans was LaBelle’s holy-shit-who-is-this-kid breakout, Saturday Night is the movie that will decide whether he can carry the weight of an ensemble cast of his peers—which includes fellow hopeful heavyweights such as Rachel Sennott, Dylan O’Brien, and Cooper Hoffman—on his shoulders. (An image of LaBelle hoisting the troupe like the Greek titan Atlas is the official poster for Saturday Night.) If LaBelle’s booked his next role, we don’t know about it yet. Life beyond Monday night at the Elgin is a question mark. Still, if all goes well, there’s going to be an undeniable before and after Saturday Night for LaBelle. He’s on the precipice of something, not so unlike those seven comedians in Studio 8H fifty years ago.

I order the wrap of the week (sorry, Gabriel) and ask LaBelle what happened when he met Lorne Michaels. “I heard a lot of stories, so I knew what to expect, but I’m sure it was weird for him,” he says. “Some fuckin’ twenty-year-old kid coming up to you, saying, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be how a lot of people discover your story.’ ”

To wildly distill half a century of SNL history: Michaels, who, like LaBelle, is Jewish Canadian, founded the show when he was just thirty years old. He promptly and improbably created a countercultural hit that would launch the careers of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and countless others. He’s earned plenty of praise and criticism on the way to this fall’s fiftieth season. As Paul McCartney recently put it, “He’s a benevolent dictator.”

In March, Michaels met LaBelle before the season 49 episode hosted by Josh Brolin, which most of the movie’s cast attended. They were about to start filming, and director Jason Reitman didn’t want Movie Lorne to ask too many questions to Real Lorne. (Half a century later, he’s a different man than the guy LaBelle was about to play, after all.) “It was almost like neither of us really acknowledged it,” LaBelle says. The unspoken danger? The potential of this interaction going something like: Hi, Mister Lorne Michaels, sir, I’m playing you in your quasi-biopic that you’re not involved in! “I was nervous,” LaBelle recalls. “I didn’t want to be overbearing. I wanted to respect Jason [asking me to] not ask any questions. But I also left thinking, Should I have said more about it?!”

Whatever LaBelle said or didn’t say to the man who inspired Dr. Evil (look it up!), he did precisely the right thing. Saturday Night could’ve been the thousandth grinding, formulaic biopic we’ve seen this century: Lorne Michaels moves to the United States! He shops around the idea for SNL, but no one believes in him! He recruits Chase, Belushi, and Aykroyd, just like they’re the Avengers! Instead, Saturday Night smashes dozens of true stories from the first several years of SNL into ninety real-time minutes of unbridled chaos. The credits roll when you hear those seven iconic words: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” To underscore the madness: You see the dick of J. K. Simmons's Milton Berle. (When I talk to Reitman a week later, I forget to confirm that it’s a prosthetic. I’ll do better next time.)

That razzle and dazzle, though, come with risk; Saturday Night needs a grounding presence at its center. It demands an actor with enough dramedic chops to function as the connective tissue for the entire cast, which also includes Succession’s Nicholas Braun as Andy Kaufman (and Jim Henson), as well as Willem Dafoe as the big bad NBC exec. LaBelle nails it. He captures the dry, fake-it-till-he-makes-it affect of Michaels at thirty perfectly—the result of tireless research. At one point, when I say that I saw “an old interview with him,” LaBelle immediately knows which one I’m talking about (Michaels on The Tomorrow Show in 1975) and says he watched it dozens of times a day. “I wanted to get the facial mannerisms: how he holds his brow, his mouth, and how he pronounces certain words,” LaBelle says. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Are you doing Austin Powers?’ No, he doesn’t actually sound like that.”

The entirety of Saturday Night is one big game of tag, except that LaBelle is “it” the entire time and he’s chasing Hollywood’s next generation of greats. With Rachel Sennott’s Rosie Shuster (Michaels’s wife at the time), he flashes the loneliness of a man who was fourteen when his father died; opposite Hoffman’s Dick Ebersol, LaBelle channels the conviction, anxiety, and heart of an auteur who is about to change comedy forever. “The movie sits on [LaBelle’s] shoulders for ninety straight minutes,” says Reitman. “It’s so much responsibility and pressure. What’s amazing is he’s a twenty-one-year-old man who just doesn’t buckle.”

It reminds Reitman of another actor: Dustin Hoffman. “He’s this young Jewish man who’s always close to a full boil inside,” he explains. “Even when he’s being playful, you can sense Gabe just needs to turn the knob and he’s going to go from simmer to boil quickly. It’s waiting there. That’s what you always felt with Hoffman. It makes someone feel dangerous and exciting.”

It took all of thirty seconds for Reitman to realize LaBelle’s unshakability. In a story that could come only from Tinseltown: while filming Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Reitman stopped by the London premiere of The Fabelmans, where he saw Spielberg holding court next to LaBelle, who was also—maybe even equally—working the room. “He’s twenty-one years old, but he’s telling stories as though he’s twice his own age,” he remembers. Reitman was intrigued. He was searching for his Lorne and, on a whim, took LaBelle out for coffee the next day. That went well enough to whip out the rare same-day second-date invite: American Psycho that night with his crew at the Prince Charles theater.

Before the movie was over, they leaned over to Reitman and said that he found his guy.

“How is it?” asks LaBelle, graciously offering narrative closure to the now very extended wrap bit we have going. I don’t have the heart to tell him that it’s probably in the B tier of Elgin wraps, so I say it’s phenomenal. “Yeah? Oh, brilliant. This is a really well-cooked salmon,” he replies. It occurs to me that LaBelle may be doing the same thing that I just did to him, but nonetheless we begin tracing his road to Studio 8H. (Well, technically, the exact replica that production designer Jess Gonchor built for the film.)

Mom is a hairdresser; you’ll know everything you need to know by looking at Saturday Night’s Instagram, where she’ll often comment a wholesome “Happy birthday 🥳” to various members of the cast. His dad is an actor, too, and was shooting in Vancouver when he met LaBelle’s mom. Eventually, it made sense for his dad to move there, and soon the LaBelles were born. His brother and uncle work together at a coffee roaster called (dramatic pause for its incredible name) Bean Around the World. “There’s a nice little plug for people in Vancouver,” LaBelle says.

He went to acting camp when he was eight, commencing an epic string of Baby’s First Runs that he recites with startling recall: Footloose, Seussical the Musical, Smokey Joe’s Cafe, Shrek, Grease, A Chorus Line, Aladdin, Cyrano de Bergerac (the fuck?), and A Nightmare Before Christmas. LaBelle started going to acting classes every week; at eleven years old, he had an agent. “My parents would drive me to auditions, but I never had to go away. They were smaller guest roles. So I was able to get that experience, still go to school, and every time [I acted] it would just solidify: I want more.”

LaBelle didn’t just act, though. “I was still able to have a childhood,” he says. “I was still able to grow up and develop a social life and experience the world the way kids should.” Meaning: He played rugby and football in high school. “I was a center and D-end, which is funny because I’m five-six.”

Not so long after high school football is his fabled Fabelmans audition: a Covid-era Zoom with a billion squares, and yeah, one of those squares is Steven fucking Spielberg. He nails that first brush with Spielberg, gets the gig, and suddenly he’s crushing scenes opposite Seth Rogen and Michelle Williams and Paul Dano. It leads him to Reitman, who shapes him in the image and likeness of another Mount Rushmore–level visionary in Michaels. Pretty turbo for someone who was somewhat recently in a high school production of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure with his “rugby buddy MC.” (LaBelle was Bill.)

I tell him what struck me about The Fabelmans—that, seen through a certain lens, it’s about what it actually means to choose a life in the arts. How creating what you love can rip you away from who you love. I’m asking LaBelle if he’s happy.

“I am,” he says, but the whiplash of going from Zoom auditions in Vancouver to acting under Spielberg’s lens in Los Angeles did leave a mark. “I was supposed to graduate high school, and I barely did,” LaBelle says. “I had all these plans to go to university, and I couldn’t. I was locked down for a year. Looking back, I wasn’t in my right mind going into [The Fabelmans]. And then getting spat out, having to move to L.A., work on a TV show, and make new friends and take your life seriously and want to make good work.... It can be really hard for yourself. And so I had to learn pretty quickly that I have to dedicate a lot of energy to balancing myself out.”

It didn’t take long for LaBelle to understand that “tall tales of actors who lost their mind or cracked under the pressure” aren’t always tall tales. He had to build a new life in L.A. That meant new friends, whom he’s so proud of now. (An early concern: “Should I only be friends with other actors? Because then they won’t treat me differently or put me on this weird fucking pedestal?”) LaBelle made sure that he kept himself close to family; he was just in Vancouver helping his mom move apartments, because she broke her foot. He’s not on social media, and he’s deliberate about the people he works with. The criteria for anyone in LaBelle’s orbit, professional and personal: “[They’re all] very well-rounded and have their shit figured out and are in it for the right reasons.”

It occurs to him that fame might not be great for anyone. “There’s a very specific interaction that people have with actors, and it’s either really inflative or deflative,” he says. “You either feel condescended [to] or you’re being praised so much and treated with this aura around you and you just feel separate.... People can get really lost in it so quickly if they’re not self-aware.”

LaBelle knows how he feels about that: “That scares the shit out of me.”

We walk off dinner in Central Park and are somewhere around the pickleball courts (since when are there pickleball courts in Central Park?) when LaBelle is about to reveal his favorite Spielberg movies. I sense a thesis-length answer coming. “Oh, man,” he says. “I was really moved by Empire of the Sun. Oh, look, New York rats!”

Wait, what? But sure enough, we break up a small gathering of rats who, not ready for Spielberg discourse, scurry into the bushes. LaBelle also likes 1941, with Belushi and Aykroyd. He just took his buddies to see Jaws in theaters.

There’s one question I haven’t asked: Save for a certain Billy Crystal moment that actually happened, Saturday Night portrays Michaels as a stressed-out but almost entirely do-gooding leader—which, if you’ve read a chapter or two from the SNL oral history, could strike a false note. Did Saturday Night feel any responsibility to show the man Michaels would become?

“We just focus on the ninety minutes leading [up to the first show],” LaBelle says. “That’s the story we care to indulge.” Adds Reitman: “Lorne is an enigma. He’s clearly very specific about what he shows the world. And I was not as interested in: Can I crack this enigma? There’s a truth that’s undeniable, which is he created something that changed comedy, changed television, and gave birth to one hundred stars. And he didn’t do it once. He did it repeatedly over fifty years. This is the moment right before it happens.”

There’s the potential issue of how the famously vocal real-life SNL figures will respond to the film. Reacting to O’Brien’s casting, Aykroyd savagely muttered, “I’m just glad the young actor got work. If he’s compelled to play me, well, I’m glad he got work.” Does LaBelle care if Michaels is happy that he, another young actor, got work?

“I can’t remember if I chose not to or had to work at it or just genuinely was like, All right! ... What’s Lorne gonna do? Have this big press conference and say, ‘He was perfect. I’m gonna invite him to host every show, and he’s my favorite actor’? I don’t anticipate any of that. You just focus on the job at hand and make sure that you can tell the story of the film as best as possible—these guys are big!”

He’s referring to the second mob of New York City rats on our path. It’s a party this time. And they’re all so big that they’ve certainly swallowed the rats we saw by the pickleball courts.

They’re the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rats, I say.

LaBelle looks to his left, at the single rodent standing in defiance: “That’s Splinter right there.”

So what happens next? LaBelle might film something later this year or early next. (“I can’t say what it is yet because it may not even be real.”) No one put the stakes better than Reitman: “There’s going to be a lot of opportunity for him. Now the challenge is going to be: What kind of actor do you want to be? He’s young, handsome, and physically fit. Maybe he wants to be hanging off the side of a skyscraper with an Uzi.”

The director’s not far off, actually: “I would love to do something physical,” LaBelle says separately. “Oh, God. I would love to do Planet of the Apes and be an ape. I feel like I’ve played a lot of introverted characters, so I’d love to lean more into all-out expression.”

Tomorrow, LaBelle will fly right back to Los Angeles, where he’ll join the frenzy of what may become the second monthslong awards campaign of his young career. Translated: He ought to head back to the hotel, rent a movie, and pass out early. (He’s on a Pixar kick, and last night was Ratatouille.) Wait. Maybe not. We dip out of the park around the Home Alone 2 hotel and LaBelle spies the Paris Theater.

“Oh, I may actually catch a movie there,” he says, entirely serious.

What movie?!

“I don’t know yet!”

Opening image: Tank and trousers by Amiri; boots by Marsèll; necklace by Eliburch Jewelry.

Photographed by Jennifer Livingston
Styled by Alfonso Fernández Navas
Grooming by Ryann Carter using Caudalie
Contributing Visual Director, James Morris
Executive Producer, Video, Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment, Randi Peck