Live from New York—we’re going behind the SNL sets. The iconic sketch comedy show, created by Lorne Michaels, is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025. SNL first premiered on October 11, 1975, with George Carlin as the host. Though the sketches, hosts, and musical guests have changed every week since, adapting to reflect the culture the show so often skewers, and the cast has evolved over the years (with the likes of Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, and more going on to have illustrious post-SNL careers), filming has taken place at Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City since the very beginning.
In a new video for AD, cast members Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim, and Chloe Fineman lead a tour through the iconic space, showing off the hair, makeup, and wardrobe departments, backstage hallways, and even Gardner’s personal dressing room, an explosion of neon lights and quirky memorabilia she says is “basically my 16-year-old bedroom.”
Along with two members of the show’s production design team, Joe DeTullio and Akira “Leo” Yoshimura (the latter has worked on the show since the very beginning), the comedians reveal some little-known facts about the inner-workings of the SNL sets. Below, we recap the most interesting bits—so read on to brush up before you tune in to watch a slew of special guests including Bad Bunny, Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, Tom Hanks, and more descend on Studio 8H for SNL50: The Anniversary Special on February 16.
The main stage has changed, but the same clock has hung on the set for 50 years
Each week, the host delivers a monologue from a stage known among the cast and crew as “home base.” Today, it is decorated to resemble Grand Central Terminal, but it has had many different iterations over the years. “I believe the very first home base that we did in ’75 was to represent a comedy club in New York in the basement of a West Village brownstone,” says Yoshimura. “The important thing is, it’s about New York.” Over the years, the stage has been decorated like a brownstone, the Brooklyn Bridge, and more, but the production designers feel that the Grand Central stage “nails it.” Eagle-eyed viewers will notice a fake window, decorated as if it is a shoe shining shop, with an old wood clock in it. This clock has hung in the sets for all 50 years, and is the official timekeeper of the production. “There is an old stage hand named Joe Riley who goes in and makes sure every Saturday that the clock is telling the exact right time and also that the clock is wound,” says Yoshimura.
Multiple sketches are performed on the same stages each night
There are six stages in Studio 8H, including the music stage and home base. “Typically there’s more sketches than there are stages,” explains Gardner. Careful planning determines which sketches will take place on which stages, in order to leave enough time to turn over the sets in between. “During the break between the cold open and the monologue, they are rolling up carpet, they are taking down walls…,” says Gardner, noting that sometimes a set change has to happen in as little as two and a half minutes. “It’s a real machine here.” It takes a crew of roughly 540 people, across many different departments, to make it all happen.
Roughly 1,000 handwritten, color-coded cue cards are created for each show
It may seem lo-fi in 2025, but SNL still runs on handwritten cue cards, and there are dedicated desks backstage for crew members to create these on the fly. “This is happening during the show, because there’s always changes for time,” says Gardner, who estimates that anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 cue cards are used for each episode. “The cue cards are a big deal here. They are our oxygen. They are our lifeline.” The lettering on the cards is color-coded, so the actors can tell which lines are theirs, with the host’s lines always written in black. “I usually get red or green,” reveals Gardner.
There is a room with molds of every cast member’s face
When a new cast member starts, a mold is made of their face, so that the makeup department can create prosthetics for them in record time, while they are busy with rehearsal and preparation for Saturday night. These molds live in a designated room, where faces of comedy legends stare creepily from the shelves. “They can then use it to make mustaches, pimples, eyebrows, boobs on your head,” explains Fineman.
About 80 custom wigs are used per episode
New cast members also sit for a model of their head to be made, so that the hair department can similarly create wigs for them on short notice. “For us, it takes about 50 hours or less [to make a wig],” explains Jodi Mancuso, head of hair design. “Most wigmakers need 80 or more. But we don’t have the time.” An average of 80 wigs are used per episode, Mancuso explains, and they are filed meticulously, so they can be reused whenever possible and so she can keep track of wigs for recurring characters. Each cast member has a binder Mancuso calls a “bible” that lists the wigs they have worn. And as the longest-serving cast member in SNL history with 22 seasons, Kenan Thompson’s is especially thick.
