SNL cast member Kenan Thompson talks competing with Anthony Anderson for a lot of roles as both stars were auditioning in the 90s.
Kenan Thompson has carved quite a comedy career for himself, having started on Nickelodeon’s All That to being one of Saturday Night Live‘s most seasoned cast members. As he grew up in the 90s, he starred on Kenan & Kel as a teen and started to venture into movies. Meanwhile, around the same time, Anthony Anderson, who is quite a veteran of many TV and film projects himself, starred in the Saturday morning teen sitcom Hang Time on NBC. Thompson would reveal that when he auditioned for roles in that era, one name that constantly followed him around was Anderson’s.
People Magazine spoke with Kenan Thompson on the podcast, PEOPLE in the ‘90s, where he explained, “Anthony Anderson, I would always see his name on the list. Whether I would see him at the actual audition or not, he was always in the running.” Thompson added, “We’ve been in the same conversations for characters, probably in a lot of things throughout the ‘90s for sure.” And while they both managed to successfully pave their own paths, Thompson would show admiration for Anderson’s filmography. He mentioned that his favorite film of Anderson’s was The Departed, because, “I know what that movie did for his career. Before that, he was the go-to guy for Barbershop and comic relief roles. But The Departed was like, ‘Oh s—, this guy’s in a [Martin] Scorsese movie. Then, very soon after that, Law & Order. I love him to death. He’s my brother.”
While a generation of youngsters knew him instantly from his Nickelodeon shows, the Good Burger star says his fame was “slow-going.” Thompson explained that when he went to college, he wasn’t recognized nearly as much as when he was younger, “Nickelodeon just took a while because it was cable, it was a smaller show. I was going to college and it was blowing up, nobody in college was watching Nickelodeon. I was famous early-ish if I would go to Chuck E. Cheese. It was little kids at the time and the show was out and it was fresh.”
After reuniting with Kel Mitchell on Good Burger 2, Thompson definitely sees it as a path to more team-ups, “It would be only right for us to continue to go explore what Kenan and Kel could have been when we were in our 20s when we left Nickelodeon and decided to try to figure it out, instead of just automatically doing the Abbott and Costello thing. Now that we’re older and sharper and wiser and this that and the other, we can do it at such a high level on so many different outlets or whatever. We know so much now. There’s so many different parts to the business. There’s so many different opportunities and we’re just ready to tackle all of that. So it’s very exciting, I think, especially when we’ll be able to own it.”
