For his biggest role yet, Lamorne Morris is once again ‘the Black dude’

“‘This is intentional, Lamorne,’” the 41-year-old would tell himself. The goal was to make the film’s set (which did, in fact, have Black crew members and actors) feel like it did for Garrett back in 1975. Isolating. Infuriating.

“My God, man. Imagine what Garrett’s going through,” Lamorne says. “He’s so accomplished theatrically and he gets there and it’s like d--- and fart jokes. Like what? What am I doing here?” In “Saturday Night,” the Broadway-pedigreed Garrett, then 38, feels like an outsider among the mostly young and largely White future superstars of SNL. Decades later, Lamorne knew all about that kind of Hollywood existentialism, where Black actors find themselves wondering: What am I doing here?

Just as Garrett’s contributions to the early SNL are too often qualified, Lamorne once felt similarly reduced on his own hit show “New Girl.” He thinks back: “‘Oh I know that show. You’re the Black dude.’ It was like that a lot,” Lamorne says of the Fox sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel, which aired from 2011 to 2018. “And that’s kind of how Garrett felt when people mentioned SNL.”

So maybe it’s funny — or fate — that for his first big film role, Lamorne is once again playing the Black dude. One who, it turns out, delivers “one of the biggest moments in the movie,” according to Reitman. It involves a little ditty about “whiteys” that pops the balloon of tension enveloping the film.

“It’s nuts, right? Life is weird that way,” says Lamorne, who used to watch Garrett guest star on “Martin” and pretend the veteran actor with whom he shares a surname was his father. Just as Garrett had to prove himself after his auspicious big break, Lamorne has emerged post-“New Girl” as an actor who can harness spontaneity, sensitivity, goofiness and depth.

Back when “New Girl” first became a hit, however, Lamorne had felt unmoored.

It was that nagging question: “The first two years of ‘New Girl’ I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’” Lamorne says. He had joined the cast after Damon Wayans Jr. exited after the pilot episode. There was no clear vision for Winston. Lamorne would eventually fill in the blanks of his character, a former pro basketball player (in Latvia) turned cop with a tabby cat named Ferguson.

“They were struggling to put it together,” Lamorne says of the writers and creators of “New Girl.” Looking back, he gets it. His character was a replacement. The show had been green-lit in record time. Still he recalls feeling slighted. “I couldn’t help but think race had a part in that. Not saying it did. But, I was like, ‘What the hell? Why am I not being written for the way I think I should be written for? Why is my character unemployed?’”

Eventually, “New Girl” caught up with who Winston could be. And its fans learned who Lamorne really was.

It took him time to get there, too. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, “little Lamorne’s plan was to be in the NBA,” he says with a chuckle. He caught the performing bug after his family moved to the ’burbs, and a scholarship named after SNL’s own Chris Farley allowed him to study theater at the College of DuPage and with the storied Second City.

After Lamorne threw together a résumé with his mentor Diana Griffin, Second City’s former director of talent, diversity and inclusion, he landed commercials and eventually a gig in New York as a BET veejay. “I got it by being as weird and silly as possible. Everybody else was being really cool. I could not pull that off if I tried,” he says.

He moved to Los Angeles in the late aughts. But it took longer for Lamorne to realize that not being cool was his secret sauce. He remembers the audition that changed everything — a total bomb. Or so he thought.

Lamorne was running late in a car he borrowed because his got repossessed. He’d been doing the struggling L.A. actor routine for a few years with little luck. The clock was ticking. He didn’t have time to prep, so he crammed his scenes on the slow walk from the waiting room to the audition. Someone called action and ... nothing.

“My mind blanked and I just started making stuff up,” Lamorne says.

Of course, they loved it. He booked the gig on the spot. By week’s end he got called in for three different commercials, always with one directive: “Do the same thing you did before. Just make stuff up.”

That moment broke something loose. He’d been showing up as an L.A. actor dude, not as Lamorne. Now he knew his cheat code: letting down his guard, going with his gut, making fun of the “type,” being himself.

“And then after that, the rest is history,” Lamorne says over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I made a bunch of commercials and that turned into a ‘New Girl’ audition and then you know, yeah …”

A lot happened in that “you know,” including Emmys gold.

What sets Lamorne apart, according to collaborators, is his refusal to put up a facade. He isn’t trying to be anything other than what Reitman called “a really good f------ actor.”

That vulnerability drew in “Fargo” creator Noah Hawley. “It’s a lack of cynicism and it’s also a lack of armor,” Hawley says. “He’s the guy who brought his mom to the Emmys. He didn’t go out in the world and put on a tough-guy veneer. He went out in the world as someone who seemed open to the world.” On “Fargo,” a show seeking an alternative to the toxic masculinity “that we are plagued with right now,” Hawley says, Lamorne could provide the antidote: a man who is tough on the inside but doesn’t feel the need to perform it.

Take a scene in which Lamorne’s Deputy Witt Farr tries to help a battered Dorothy (Juno Temple) escape her abusive ex-husband (Jon Hamm). He could’ve stared down the villain, but Lamorne barely looks at Hamm while treating with Dorothy. It was a choice. “He’s talking to her. There’s other actors who would have talked to Jon Hamm in that scene,” Hawley says.

When he earned his Emmy, Lamorne kept it together onstage — calling out his 4-year-old daughter Lily, who’d watched him crying (along with hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers) when the nomination call came months before.

It’s a lot, says the man with a healthy perspective on being a lot. “I’m never over it, you know? Because to me, it’s not — I don’t want to belittle the work that we do as actors, but it’s not hard labor,” Lamorne says. “My mom worked on the floor at the post office for 40 years in a distribution center. People are coal miners. People have really hard jobs. So I get giddy and excited that I continuously get to keep doing this. So, you know, that’s why all the emotion.”

And now Lamorne has slipped into the shoes of Garrett, a Renaissance man with the musicality of Sammy Davis Jr., the political awareness of Amiri Baraka and the acting chops of James Earl Jones. Not just “the Black dude,” but someone who reveals more unexpected layers with each punchline.

When Reitman cast Lamorne as the first actor in “Saturday Night,” the director says his Garrett was “undeniable — he was born to play this role.” For Lamorne, it was another watershed audition — but this time he came prepared.

He woke up to an email about the role and got to work — salvaging an old blazer and tie from his brother’s closet, setting up a camera in front of the blue wall painted in the bedroom of his Chicago pad, letting it rip. (He has residences in L.A. and back home now.)

“I just watched it and went, ‘Yep.’” said Reitman. “There’s a tendency to come at it with only swagger.” But Lamorne played it deeper. “There are a lot of funny people,” Reitman says before correcting himself. “No, not a lot.”

Set in the 90 minutes before showtime, “Saturday Night” is packed, with close to 80 speaking roles and a short-attention-span energy that never lingers on one character or crisis for longer than an instant. How do you make an impression in a tornado? By stopping the storm.

After spending most of the film pinballing around set, the Julliard-trained Garrett delivers that jaw-dropping parody song, cementing his place in the cast and quieting any doubters — including himself.

Says Reitman: “Lamorne just kind of inherently understood that search for identity that Garrett was going through.”

But what was Garrett going through? He’ll tell you.

“I don’t present myself as a victim. I was very hard to get along with and I had an attitude too,” Garrett, now 88, says of his turbulent five years on the show. He had a chip on his shoulder (and a monkey on his back). “That affected my attitude — a lot.” He’s mellowed since then. “I am a Buddhist. I was not as evolved then as I am now.”

When he was creating his new weekly sketch comedy show for NBC, Lorne Michaels hired Garrett as a writer to help diversify his staff. The producer had spotted the actor in the film “Cooley High” and read a play he had written. But penning a two-hour play was nothing like writing two-minute sketches.

Leading up to the premiere, Garrett was having a hard time cranking out material. There were grumblings that he should be shown the door. John Belushi and Gilda Ratner convinced Michaels that the actor might be better in front of the camera. He auditioned and got promoted to player. His writing credits went away along with, Garrett says, some of the credit he deserved. He never got over that. But he also didn’t quit.

The older Morris had one ask for the man tasked with playing him: “Tell it honestly and let the people know I didn’t quit. I didn’t give up. I really tried my best on that show,” the younger Morris says.

To get at that grit — and deliver one of the fullest arcs in “Saturday Night” — Lamorne drops little breadcrumbs of humanity whenever he appears on screen, Reitman says.

Mission accomplished. Watching the film — watching himself — was “a very cathartic experience,” Garrett says. “To say the least.”