Shane Gillis Dropped From 'S.N.L.' Cast Amid Criticism of Racist Slurs [View all]

[Miles Archer]

Shane Gillis Dropped From ‘S.N.L.’ Cast Amid Criticism of Racist Slurs

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/arts/television/shane-gillis-snl.html

Shane Gillis, a comedian named last week to the “Saturday Night Live” cast before videos surfaced in which he used slurs and offensive language, will not be joining the show, the program announced on Monday.

“After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining ‘S.N.L.’” a spokesperson for the show said in a statement.

“We want ‘S.N.L.’ 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 ‘S.N.L.’ We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier, and that our vetting process was not up to our standard.”

Gillis, 31, came under fire just a few hours after he and two new cast members — one of them the show’s first Chinese-American — were named for the coming season. A journalist unearthed a video of a podcast in which he used a slur in referring to Chinese people and mocked a caricature accent of a Chinese person speaking English.