What Makes SNL’s Latest Rising Star So Unique—and More Critical Than Ever for the Show

In a September 2020 podcast interview, two years before he would join Saturday Night Live and cement his status as a rising star in comedy, a then–largely unknown Marcello Hernández cited Jerry Seinfeld as his comic idol, saying, “I want to be the Hispanic Jerry Seinfeld.” He pointed to Seinfeld’s style of observational humor, as well as his advice on how a struggling comedian should approach his career: “Seinfeld says that the amount of years you’ve been doing comedy is your age in comedy,” explained Hernández, who at the time of the interview was approaching his fifth year in the field. He said he didn’t expect to make it big until he’d been doing stand-up for a good 15 to 18 years, when he reached comedy adulthood. “If you think long term like that, like you’re just gonna do this forever and get as good as you possibly can at it,” he said, “nothing can stop you.”

In comedy years, Hernández was only 6 when he was hired as an SNL cast member for the show’s 48^th season—and 25 in actual years, making him not just young but the show’s resident young person. He’s currently SNL’s youngest cast member and its first Gen Z cast member outside the Please Don’t Destroy trio. It didn’t take long for him to cement himself as a standout in the lineup. He first got viewers’ attention last year with his Weekend Update segment on Latino baseball players, establishing an immediate chemistry with Colin Jost on par with that of Leslie Jones and Sarah Sherman before him. He’s since been back on Colin’s side of the desk to talk about male depression and his pride in being a “short king.” Last November, he memorably joined Timothée Chalamet onstage to rap about having a “baby face.”

Not all of Hernández’s jokes are groundbreaking, so to speak, but it’s his confident, energetic delivery that makes it them feel just fresh enough. He’s undeniably charming, between his absurdly wholesome outlook and his total commitment to even the flimsiest 10-to-1 sketches. He has also displayed a brave willingness to show off perhaps too much of his body for comedy’s sake, as his recent viral moment wearing “booty khakis” made clear. His work has paid off: Earlier this month, he made his debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and it was recently announced that Hernández has signed with the talent-management company LBI Entertainment. It’s safe to say that Hernández is now a fan favorite who could even, should his ambition match his talent, become a household name one day.

What makes Hernández unique is not just that he’s a zoomer—although SNL makes full use of that, expertly deploying him in youth-oriented sketches like “Crown Your Short King” and “Dune Popcorn Bucket”—but also that he’s the first cast member whose material is so consistently intertwined with his Latino identity. Case in point: his viral 2023 sketch about a high school Spanish class that’s thrown into disarray after two foreign-exchange students from Cuba—one played by Hernández, the other by Ana de Armas—innocently put the awkward white teacher Señor Macintosh (Mikey Day) in the hot seat. The sketch, inspired by Hernández’s now-famous stand-up bit about how he took a Spanish class at a very white college in Ohio so that he could finally enjoy being the smartest student, works in part because of how well observed the English speakers’ mistakes are. Their butchered Spanish pronunciation and stilted grammar are relatable not just to any native Spanish speaker who’s had to listen to Americans’ novice attempts to speak their language, but to pretty much any American who’s been taught “así así” in Spanish 101.

What makes the sketch unique is that both Hernández’s and de Armas’ characters speak Spanish for significant stretches, with no translation provided for the audience. From a non-Spanish-speaking viewer’s perspective, the sketch works because it puts us right into the headspace of Day’s character as his classroom authority slips away from him. From a Spanish speaker’s perspective, it works because the Spanish being spoken is genuinely fluent. The two even use Cuban-specific slang and accents, failing to treat Latin American speech as a monolith, as so many English-language shows unwittingly do. The whole sketch feels almost like a celebration of Latin culture—especially given that de Armas had referenced, in the episode’s opening monologue, the challenges she’d faced as a Cuban immigrant to the U.S. who knew only Spanish. As an actress who had spent the past few years taking on primarily English-speaking roles, she seemed thrilled to get to perform in her native language again.

Hernández took on a similar role earlier that year with Pedro Pascal, when it was the Last of Us star’s turn to host SNL. Although the Chilean American actor became fluent in English from a much earlier age than de Armas had, he grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, as Hernández did in Miami. Collaborating with Hernández gave Pascal the chance to return to his mother tongue with “Protective Mom,” a sketch about what it’s like to have a Latin mother. Pascal came to Hernández specifically to work on it, according to the latter. “[Pedro] came to the show, and he had this idea of wanting to do something in Spanish,” Hernández explained in an interview with Seth Meyers. “I was lucky enough to be the only person at the show that could write in Spanish, and it just gave me this great opportunity.”

This wasn’t the first time someone had written a Spanish sketch for the show; former Latino cast members Fred Armisen and Horatio Sanz wrote and starred in a handful of Spanish-heavy sketches throughout the 2000s. “Besos y Lagrimas” was a recurring cartoonish parody of telenovelas, and “The Manuel Ortiz Show” was a recurring parody of Spanish-language talk shows. But although many of these sketches contained references to Latin culture, as well as an accuracy with the language that went beyond what SNL had offered in previous decades, it still often felt as if they had been written to avoid even momentarily alienating an English-speaking audience, instead of fully embracing the Spanish language and Latin humor for an audience that understood it.

Fast-forward more than a decade, and now SNL has even gotten Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny to host an entire episode, despite his lack of fluency in English. His episode, which aired in October, was the most blatantly bilingual SNL had ever been, with half the monologue and three major sketches performed primarily in Spanish. The most impressive of them is “Telenovela.” The basic premise of the sketch is easy to follow, but viewers who don’t speak Spanish will likely miss many of the absurd line exchanges, like the one where the assumed-dead father reveals that the volcano he fell into was actually inactive. For perhaps the first time in SNL’s history, this was a sketch meant for Latin America first, and the rest of America second.

The groundbreaking Bad Bunny episode was also easily Marcello Hernández’s biggest SNL showcase to that point. He featured prominently in each of those Spanish-heavy sketches and proved himself invaluable in smoothing over any potential awkwardness onstage. (Day, the second-most-fluent Spanish speaker among the main cast, also tried his best.) As Hernández later explained on the Today show, he was the one explaining to Bad Bunny why lines like “sneaky link” and “side chick” would work for an English-speaking audience. The two formed a strong connection behind the scenes, one that led to Bad Bunny soon asking Hernández to star in the rapper’s recent music video. To SNL’s non-Latin audience, this might not seem like that big of a deal, but those familiar with the sheer scale of Bad Bunny’s popularity worldwide realize exactly how huge this is. In terms of Hernández getting closer to becoming a household name, his association with Bad Bunny may be bigger than anything he’s done on SNL so far.

For Latin American fans, Hernández’s rising fame is especially notable because it comes at the end of a weird decadelong slump in Latino representation on SNL. When Armisen left in spring 2013, he seemed to take all the show’s Hispanic jokes with him. Then, after three years of having zero Latin American cast members, SNL brought on comedian Melissa Villaseñor, a Californian-born daughter of Mexican parents. She made headlines in 2016 for being the show’s first Latina cast member, but the show quickly put a damper on that milestone by keeping her largely in the background for six seasons straight. (Throughout Villaseñor’s run, Latinos made up a higher percentage of the American population than ever before, but you’d never have guessed that from the way SNL kept her on the sidelines.)

In light of Hernández’s success, one potential explanation for Villaseñor’s lack of airtime is that she didn’t (as of 2022, at least) speak fluent Spanish, a skill that has served as the foundation of so many of Hernández’s fan-favorite moments. His bilingualism not only seems to help him write these Spanish-heavy sketches with Latin hosts, but also has widened the pool of potential guests for the show. Would SNL have even attempted to have Bad Bunny host if someone like Hernández weren’t there?

This is perhaps Hernández’s biggest contribution to SNL: He’s brought Latin American joy back onto the show. From his Jose Suarez character to his towel guy to his 15^th-century Spanish prince, Hernández always seems to be having the time of his life when he gets to speak his family’s language and make use of his heritage. After the show’s 10-year scarcity of Latin American representation, Hernández has given SNL the opportunity to not only reel in more Latin guests, but continue reaching out to a demographic it has largely ignored throughout its entire 50-year run. That, along with Hernández’s specific flavor of Gen Z comedy, helps explain his rapid rise. And coming up at just 9 years old in terms of comedy age, it seems he’s just getting started.