Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels was seeking to add a comedian to the show who would appeal to conservatives when the show originally hired Shane Gillis.
Multiple sources told Variety that Michaels was recruiting a comedian for the season in an attempt to balance the show and make it appear less biased.
SNL fired Gillis over comments he made about Chinese people including a racial slur.
“We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as comedian and his impressive audition for SNL. We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days,” a spokesperson for SNL said Monday.
A podcast from 2018 in which Gillis used the racial slur “ch–ks” resurfaced after the announcement that he had been hired by SNL.
Many of SNL‘s most high-profile sketches in the past couple of years have been members of the cast portraying and ridiculing the president and his administration.
