It was one of the biggest nights of Marcello Hernández’s career — and he had no idea where he was going.
On a Friday evening in November 2022, the then-25-year-old comedian, recently added to the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” had just wrapped rehearsal with the week’s host, Dave Chappelle. Hernández was booked to open for Jo Koy at Madison Square Garden later that night, but as he touched the app on his phone to order an Uber, he realized he hadn’t asked an important question: How do you get inside the arena?
“I was like, ‘Hey, Dave, do you know the entrance to Madison Square Garden?’” he recalls. “Dave goes, ‘You’re gonna take an Uber to Madison Square Garden?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, what’s wrong with that?’ He’s like, ‘There’s 22 entrances to Madison Square Garden. You’re never gonna get in.’”
Chappelle made a call, and soon Hernández was in a car on his way. Turns out there are eight official entrances to the Garden, but the comedian entered through a ninth doorway not available to the public.
“Fricking loading dock, ba-by.” He snaps his fingers for emphasis. It’s little wonder he’s thrilled by the memory of special access, even a year and a half later. Hernández’s rise as one of the breakout stars of “SNL” has come rapidly — and in a way that old-school comedians might not recognize.
For the past 50 years, “SNL” has been minting stars from its ensemble cast, from John Belushi to Adam Sandler, Gilda Radner to Tina Fey. Executive producer Lorne Michaels has built his show out of handpicking unknown talent and bathing them in a national spotlight. In the modern age, though, breaking out as an “SNL” cast member means starring in sketches that not only resonate with live audiences, but also achieve internet virality. That’s a feat Hernández has accomplished multiple times in just two seasons.
His first major moment arrived with “Protective Mom,” in which he plays a son introducing his white American girlfriend to his disapproving Latina mother, played by “The Last of Us” star Pedro Pascal. The sketch, which riffs on the cultural and generational differences between Miami-born Hernández and his Cuban-born mother, landed in the top five most-watched live sketches of Season 48, as did its sequel last year, which featured Pascal again, joined by Bad Bunny as Hernández’s aunt.
Matthew Sprout for Variety
“All I did was go in and say, ‘It would be great to do something with Marcello, and, I don’t know, be his protective mother or something,’” Pascal recalls. “They were like, ‘You would do that?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely. I’ll do anything you fucking want.’”
“Pedro is Latino like I am, so obviously I wanted to build the relationship somehow with him,” Hernández says. He’s sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen wearing a black baseball cap and sunglasses. His vape and phone lie on the table by a plate of hummus. He’s wearing a silver chain that he proudly says was a gift from his mother.
A lot of Hernández’s material prominently features his interactions with his mom, whom he takes obvious delight in sending up. A storyteller with a slapstick flair, he’s honed a style that marries Jerry Seinfeld’s observational humor with the joyful physicality that makes Eddie Murphy so charismatic.
After talking to Pascal about the skit, Hernández wrote “Protective Mom” using some of the material from the stand-up he performed during his “SNL” auditions. He was first scouted at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, then invited to perform at a showcase. From there, he made the rounds: studio test, a meeting with the writers, another meeting with Michaels, whom he calls “the Boss.”
Hernández offers few details of his initial encounter with the renowned producer. “You just do it,” he says, “and then your mom calls you, and she goes, ‘How did it go?’ And you go, ‘I have no idea.’ And she goes” — here, he does her voice, high-pitched and hysterical — “‘Oh, my God!’”
Michaels, for his part, recalls recognizing Hernández’s “remarkable talent.” “He just gets better and better. After a while with ‘SNL,’ you can tell the people who belong there — he’s one of them.”
He adds, “He’s not yet who he’ll be, but he’s well on his way to becoming it.”
Hernández’s mother fled Cuba with her family at age 12, moving to Spain and the Dominican Republic before immigrating to the United States alone. She worked her way through college and graduated while pregnant with Hernández, who calls her his “muse.”
“A lot of the jokes I say and the stuff that I write has to do with our relationship growing up,” he says. “She went through a lot to get to the U.S. and to make a name and a world for herself, so I respect her very much and I trust her judgment.”
Miami provided a colorful, chaotic backdrop to his adolescence. “In Miami, you grow up fast, because there’s so much clubbing that people are doing,” Hernández says. “When you’re young, you’re like, ‘I want to do that.’ Miami is like a ‘fake ID, go when you’re 17’ kind of place. You get caught a lot. They break your ID in front of you.”
Those experiences informed his “SNL” sketch “Nightclub Line,” in which he plays a promoter showing the ropes to a dim-witted bouncer, played by Jason Momoa. Audiences howled at how seriously the two characters take their jobs.
Matthew Sprout for Variety
“These promoters, they’re ruthless,” Hernández says. “They have somebody above them that’s like, ‘You have to bring in all the pretty people.’ It was really cool to be able to do that with Kenan Thompson and Jason Momoa — who really fits the bill of a sexy Miami bouncer.”
Because each week of “SNL” brings with it a new celebrity host, Hernández has had the chance to see globally famous names stretch their talents in surprising ways. Take Timothée Chalamet’s most recent appearance, where Hernández joined the Oscar-nominated actor onstage during his opening monologue, and the two — both boyish and impossibly cute — launched into a boisterous rap titled “Baby Face.” The audience cheered as the two rapped, “I got a baby face / But my hips don’t lie / Say I’m a bad kid, bitch, I’m a bad guy.”
“We gotta give Timmy his flowers,” Hernández says. “He rapped well, you know what I mean? He can flow.”
While he was in college in Cleveland, Hernández got advice from comedian Sean Patton: “He told me, ‘Go to New York once a season. Go once in the winter, go once in the fall and once in the spring. Go and hang out for a little bit — just a week or two — say hi to everybody. Make sure they remember you, so that when you come back, they’re not like, ‘Who is this guy?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s Marcello. He’s been here before.’”
On one of those trips, Hernández ran into Bill Murray. “He was standing on the sidewalk, talking to people, holding court. I just grabbed his hand, and I was like” — Hernández presses his hands together, as if sandwiching Murray’s in his own — “‘It’s very nice to see you. I love you. I love the stuff that you’ve done.’ And he was like, ‘Thank you.’”
When the pandemic began, Hernández moved back home to Miami, where he posted his own videos on TikTok and hosted a web series for a local news organization. The videos — featuring iterations of his stand-up bits and running commentary on life in Miami-Dade County — accrued millions of views, though the attention brought haters as well as fans. “My mom opened up a burner account and would be like” — Hernández becomes a biting middle-aged Cuban American woman — “‘Oh, you seem like you’re fun. I bet you’re a lot of fun, huh? This guy’s just trying to make it!’”
Restrictions eventually lifted, and he returned to New York armed with a newfound sense of his audience. After he booked “SNL,” he bumped into Murray at a party, where Hernández told him about their first encounter. “He was like, ‘OK. That’s — yeah, man,’” Hernández says, laughing, because clearly Murray didn’t remember. “He was so nice though.”
In addition to Murray, Murphy and Seinfeld, he has a long list of comedians that he looks to as references: Steve Harvey, Cedric the Entertainer, Kevin Hart, Bernie Mac. “I want to be as successful as those guys,” he says, “but I’m gonna be the Hispanic version.”
Though Hernández is still perfecting his style, he insists that he never wants to do “super vulgar comedy.” His Chalamet rap is, perhaps, as “bad” as it gets — and even then, the joke is that he’s really a sweetheart. As “Saturday Night Live” braces for a polarizing presidential election, he also gives a wide berth to politics. “I just try to stay happy and positive,” he says. “I don’t like the drama of it all.”
Then there’s Chappelle, whose recent remarks from his Netflix special “The Closer” were criticized by some as hostile toward transgender people. Hernández’s work with the comedian on “SNL” led to a couple gigs opening for Chappelle; he’s spent time with the comedian’s family too.
“I have no problem with somebody that has a problem with Chappelle,” Hernández says. “I love everybody: I love Dave, and I love anybody that’s mad at Dave.”
That’s a line that may get trickier to walk as the attention on Hernández grows and as “SNL” digs into the Trump-Harris battle. But, for now, he seems comfortable. After all, if the road to success is tough to navigate, it’s good to have a few famous friends to call for help.
