‘SNL’ Cast Evaluation: Cecily Strong’s Talent And Versatility Has Been On Display Since Day One

Cecily Strong’s Saturday Night Live introduction, in the show’s season 38 premiere, was a dubious one. On Weekend Update, she played Latina voter advocate Mimi Morales, the first, but not the last, Latina character of Strong’s that would upset some in the Hispanic community.

Strong, a Second City alum who is not Hispanic, has become the show’s go-to actress for Latina characters due in part to her long black hair, and to the show’s lack of a Hispanic female cast member. The week after her debut, the website Latino Rebels called Mimi a “stale stereotype,” and noted that Strong’s accent was “all over the place.”

Luckily, Strong didn’t have to wait long to change the conversation.

A week-and-a-half later, on Weekend Update Thursday (NBC ran a series of half-hour Weekend Update specials on Thursdays in the weeks before the 2012 presidential election), Strong debuted The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party.

Girl’s hilarity is taken from a reality we all know well, as social media is so crammed with know-nothings posing as know-it-alls that giving them a platform can seem like Twitter’s raison d’être.

Strong’s Girl (she has no proper name) is meticulously put together, a relentless social butterfly in a pink satin dress who’s outraged about the state of the world, and aims for the perfect selfie so she can blend her targeted anger with the just-right smile and outfit and send it out to the world.

Girl has opinions on everything, and each is as strong and passionately expressed as it is bereft of information, perspective or context. She could well be the niece of Bobby Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle, as she is his liberal counterpart – outraged at the state of the world, but without the ability to pinpoint the cause with any specificity.

The character’s dialogue is poetry, every sentence crafted to deliver an expectation of profundity before careening off into the bewildering nonsense of non sequiturs. Her tone is insistent and her certainty ingrained, but both pale next to her talent for expressing contempt. Girl is certain of many things, not one of which makes a lick of sense. But she knows that these things are important, and she’s judging you every minute for not understanding and prioritizing them as she does.

With this character, Strong perfects an indignant exasperation that could be seen as a physical manifestation of the troll mentality, the ultimate expression of, “I am right and you are wrong and you’re an idiot for not seeing this,” even if it’s never clear what “this” is.

With her unshakeable confidence, Strong’s Girl is a steamroller, caring intensely about everything and nothing. She has the courage to ask the tough questions, like, “Are we better than them?” and, “What are we doing?” questions that would feel more important if we had any idea what they were referring to. She says to Update anchor Seth Meyers, “I just want to teach you,” and, “Do you even read?” when it’s clear that she herself reads nothing more challenging than the captions on Instagram.

Barely two weeks into her time on the show, Girl gave Strong something new cast members rarely have that early in their tenure – job security.

Soon, viewers would see more of her range, from the easy-going, popular, ditzy friend of Aidy Bryant on “Girlfriend’s Talk Show” to the abrasive, street-tough retail worker who, with Moynihan, insults every co-worker when they think they’re about to be fired.

Before year’s end, she would also debut, with Vanessa Bayer, the dead-eyed ex-porn stars telling tales of being “banged to death” while selling misnamed products in exchange, they hope, for free swag.

Strong’s obvious value to the show was driven home with a surprise announcement before the start of her second season, when she was named co-host of Weekend Update with longtime anchor Meyers.

At the time, Meyers was preparing his late night show for NBC. Speculation about the next Update anchor was rampant, with no obvious successor save for SNL writer John Mulaney, whose own Fox sitcom removed him from consideration. While Strong’s ascent could be seen as logical given her success in the first season, it’s easy, in hindsight, to question the wisdom of the promotion, especially since she intended to continue performing sketch work along with her Update duties.

It could have been seen as an omen that her very first Update joke required her to say the names Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Anchoring Weekend Update and being a regular SNL cast member are each challenging on their own. Together they can be overwhelming, and for a cast member still acclimating in her second season, it might have been too much. Even Amy Poehler, who also did both, didn’t co-host Update until her fourth season.

Strong displayed obvious nerves in her first few episodes at the Update desk, but even after shaking them off, she and Meyers never developed the clear rapport of Update’s teams recent to that point. Given that Strong’s predecessors included Poehler, Meyers, Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon in various combinations, it’s likely she was handed a no-win situation.

By mid-season, her smiles often seemed forced, and certain audience reactions still threw her. Meanwhile, her work in sketches was less distinguished, with no memorable new characters surfacing. Given Strong’s status as Update co-anchor, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t… spent the season on the bench.

Meyers left the show in February, and head writer Colin Jost was named Strong’s Update co-anchor. The pairing seemed unsteady, and it was announced before the following season that Strong would return to sketches exclusively, with Michael Che joining Jost on the Update desk.

The change rejuvenated Strong. She brought “Girl” back to Update, and also introduced another new character with a long descriptive title, A One-Dimensional Female Character from a Male-Driven Comedy. Her name, we soon discovered, was Heather.

Heather is a distillation of every cheesy cliche from the movies her character’s name describes. Like “Girl,” her interplay with the anchor is key – in this case, Jost becomes the object of her character’s defining desire – but her lines almost constitute monologues, as Jost’s responses are irrelevant to what comes next.

Strong uses Heather, timed to the growing conversation online about the lack of solid roles for women in Hollywood, to show just how shallowly such characters are often written. Designed with bangs and glasses – because this character always looks nerdy before removing her glasses and revealing how hot she really is – she speaks not in conversational sentences, but in descriptive exposition, outlining the limited parameters of these characters, including the tiny range of emotions and actions they’re allowed to portray.

She describes how Jost will react when she removes her glasses, and reels off her positive attributes like a robot reciting a grocery list. While Girl shreds a certain type of person, Heather takes on an industry, exposing the limited portrayal of women in many male-centered films, and reflecting to us, by way of our immediate familiarity with every aspect of her character, how ingrained these sexist, incomplete versions of women have become over the course of our lifelong movie-going experience.

Along the way, Strong’s popularity on the show has translated to opportunities elsewhere. She was the headlining comedian at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and was cast in the upcoming Ghostbusters re-do.

Given how much she went through in her first three seasons, Strong finds herself in an odd position in her fourth, as there’s cause to wonder how much SNL has left to offer her.

Strong has made a smaller splash this season, partially due to the sheer size of the cast (16, including featured players). Ironically, after her last memorable character skewed negative female stereotypes, she’s spent much of this season in wife or sidekick roles, as with her take on Melania Trump, or in the Right Side of the Bed sketches.

Her latest Weekend Update desk character, Glamour writer Jill Davenport, sought to reveal the idiocy of magazines such as that one. But Davenport, who flirted with Jost the whole time (a now too-common crutch for female Update characters?) instead of delivering her report, only worked if you made the conscious connection to her name and affiliation. Without them, she was just a woman flirting instead of doing her job, leading some to complain the character was more sexist than feminist. (Mashable’s article on the sketch was headlined, “WTF, SNL. Way to set back female tech reporters.”) Jill Davenport herself offered little commentary or laughs; without constantly reminding yourself that she worked for Glamour, she was without purpose.

Viewers have become so attached to the current cast that it’s easy to forget how large this cast is. Historically, sixteen cast members is an awful lot for SNL – note the increase in recent years of sketches with larger groups, such as the music videos that feature the entire female cast.

Given this, it’s easy for a talent like Strong to be overshadowed. Her acting this season has been as solid as ever, but given the stellar work so far by Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Vanessa Bayer, Strong would need another Girl to be seen as having a comparable season.

With the changing nature of SNL stardom, it’s hard to guess what Strong’s future may hold, and how long SNL will be part of it. In the show’s early years, a whiff of a shot at movie stardom would send cast members off to greener pastures. But SNL’s increasing dominance in Hollywood has changed that. After all, Kristen Wiig stayed on the show a full season past the success of Bridesmaids.

It’s hard to say, then, what the anticipated success of Ghostbusters, scheduled for release next July, will mean for Strong —the exact nature of her role in the film, at present, is “unconfirmed”— as well as for cast members McKinnon and Jones. Over the past five years especially, SNL has become less a show than a show business ecosystem, as former cast members return to SNL frequently and guest on shows hosted by other former cast members almost weekly, and many of them star in movies (and sometimes even host awards shows) together.

As such, even those with outside success have been hesitant to cut the cord too quickly. (Despite healthy slates of film roles, Poehler and Bill Hader each remained on the show for eight seasons; Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudeikis, seven each.) By mid-2016, when Ghostbusters hits theaters, Strong and McKinnon will each have four seasons under their belt. Given the lack of a dominant breakout cast member, it’s likely that none of the cast, save possibly veteran Kenan Thompson, will voluntarily leave for a few seasons. But if any were to go sooner, the smart money would be on McKinnon, who is generally considered the show’s current MVP, and is also its most recent Emmy nominee.

Strong’s talent and versatility, though, make her a strong bet for surprising types of success down the road. Just as Wiig has spent much of her post-SNL career starring in independent dramas, Strong has the potential to take her career down unexpected paths, equally imaginable as a slapstick heroine or a romantic lead.

Larry Getlen is the author of the book Conversations with Carlin. His greatest wish is to see Stefon enjoy a cheeseburger at John Belushi’s diner. Follow him on Twitter at @larrygetlen.

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[Photo Credits: NBC]