When Did Jimmy Fallon Join SNL? All About the Season 24 Cast
Jimmy Fallon and Chris Parnell were among the new faces joining Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Tracy Morgan.
Saturday Night Live in the late '90s was on a roll. Entering Season 24, the lineup was headlined by fan favorites Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Darrell Hammond, Tim Meadows, Tracy Morgan, Cheri Oteri, Chris Kattan, and Ana Gasteyer. And they were about to add a few important names to the fold.
Jimmy Fallon, Chris Parnell, and Horatio Sanz started the new season as members of the featured cast, and Tina Fey, who had joined the writing staff the previous season, was working her way into an increasingly important role (she'd become the show's first female head writer in Season 25 and would eventually appear in sketches and as the co-anchor of "Weekend Update" beginning in 2000).
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Season 24 kicked off on September 26, 1998, with Cameron Diaz as Host and The Smashing Pumpkins as Musical Guest.
Who was in SNL's Season 24 cast
Jimmy Fallon
A fixture on SNL from 1998 through 2004, Jimmy Fallon honed the comedic delivery that would later make him a late-night television mainstay as the host of the The Tonight Show. Fallon, then 24, became known for singing impressions ranging from the falsetto-crooning Barry Gibbs to heavy metal maestro Marilyn Manson, and followed in the footsteps of SNL predecessor Adam Sandler when it came to supplying parody songs on “Weekend Update.” He'd introduce his long-running Boston teen character, Pat "Sully" Sullivan, during Season 25.
Will Ferrell
Will Ferrell joined Saturday Night Live in 1997 as a relative unknown from the L.A. comedy troupe The Groundlings, and would leave seven seasons later as one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. His time on the show marked him for superstardom in future movies including Elf, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and Old School. Ferrell, 31 at the start of Season 24, proved equally adept at impressions (Alex Trebek, Janet Reno, George W. Bush) and playing oblivious buffoons (Craig Buchanan, the Spartan cheerleader).
“I had a wonderful seven seasons on that show, where I made lifelong friends,” Ferrell told The Hollywood Reporter in November. “I knew in that moment it would be the hardest but most fun job I would ever get to do, and I still look back on it that way.”
Ana Gasteyer
Another alum of The Groundlings, Ana Gasteyer, then 31, was in the midst of a six-season run on Saturday Night Live during Season 24. She continued to play one of her go-to characters, high school music teacher Bobbi Mohan-Culp, opposite Ferrell’s Marty Culp. After SNL, Gasteyer enjoyed a career split between movies (Mean Girls), television (The Goldbergs), and theater (the recent Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress).
Darrell Hammond
A versatile impressionist, Darrell Hammond is the only member of the Season 24 still affiliated with the show full-time more than a quarter of a century later. He returned in 2014, this time as the announcer, filling the position long held by the late Don Pardo. As a cast member, he was a mainstay from 1995 through 2009, impersonating a wide-range of celebrities over his 14 seasons, including Bill Clinton, Ted Koppel, Phil Donahue, and Al Gore.
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Chris Kattan
Best known for playing recurring characters like Mango the exotic dancer, Mr. Peepers, and one half of the head-bobbing Butabi brothers (alongside Ferrell), Chris Kattan performed as a Saturday Night Live cast-member from 1996 to 2003. Kattan, who turned 28 a few weeks into Season 24, was one of many SNL stars who got their start with The Groundlings, the L.A. comedy troupe co-founded by his father.
Tim Meadows
The elder statesman of the cast heading into Season 24, Tim Meadows performed for a then-record 10 seasons on SNL (current cast-member Kenan Thompson has been on the show for 22 seasons and counting). Meadows provided the show with a number of impersonations, including Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, and O.J. Simpson. He could toggle between deadpan delivery and over-the-top comedic bombast. His recurring SNL character, Leon Phelps, would get his own movie treatment with the 2000 release of The Ladies Man.
Tracy Morgan
Having honed his skills on the stand-up circuit in his hometown of New York City, Tracy Morgan broke out with a memorable recurring guest star role as Hustle Man on the sitcom, Martin. After catching the attention of producers in 1996, he was cast on Saturday Night Live, on which he starred for seven seasons.
“I love doing Saturday Night Live. It’s late night, it’s live, baby, it’s like Jackie Gleason,” Morgan told authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for the book, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “Once you do this show, you’ve made TV immortality. I’m going to be on TV the rest of my life. My grandkids will be able to see this.”
Morgan would go on to play Tracy Jordan in Tina Fey’s acclaimed sitcom, 30 Rock, which was also produced by Michaels, from 2006 to 2013.
Cheri Oteri
Cheri Oteri, another Groundlings graduate, joined the show in Season 21 and brought a chaotic energy to the characters she played — including the overly cheerful Spartan Cheerleader Arianna. She also delivered impressions of a number of celebrities during her run, including Barbara Walters and Mariah Carey. She left the show following Season 25.
Chris Parnell
Chris Parnell came to SNL as a featured player in Season 24 after performing with the L.A.-based The Groundlings. Parnell made a name for himself on the long-running NBC sketch comedy series with impersonations of news anchor Tom Brokaw, as well as the viral digital short, "Lazy Sunday," which became a major sensation on YouTube. Parnell was promoted the the repertory cast in Season 25 and spent eight years on the show in total. He's enjoyed a prolific career as a voice actor on animated shows like Archer and Rick and Morty.
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Colin Quinn
Colin Quinn, a veteran of the New York City standup scene who had taken over the “Weekend Update” anchor chair from Norm Macdonald midway through Season 23, joined the show in 1995 and enjoyed a five-year run as a writer and cast member. Following his departure in 2000, he briefly hosted The Colin Quinn Show on NBC, and, later, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn on Comedy Central.
Horatio Sanz
The first Hispanic cast-member on Saturday Night Live, Horatio Sanz joined the show for Season 24 as a featured player and was promoted to repertory status the next season. The Chilean-born comic made a name for himself during his tenure at Second City in his hometown of Chicago before being hired on SNL
Molly Shannon
A six-season veteran of the show, Molly Shannon had proven a popular member to the SNL cast with her improvisational background honed at the Up Front Comedy Theater in Los Angeles. She also provided a number of memorable impersonations over her six seasons in Studio 8H, including Courtney Love and Liza Minnelli. But her signature character was Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Catholic school outcast with dreams of performing glory, which became so popular among SNL fans that Shannon brought the character to the big screen in the feature film Superstar in 1999.
