Taran Killam Recalls ‘Manifesting’ His SNL Casting the Summer Before His Audition (Exclusive)

Taran Killam wished his Saturday Night Live casting into existence.

The comedian spoke with PEOPLE about his time on the iconic sketch comedy show while on the red carpet of SNL50: The Anniversary Special in New York City on Sunday, Feb. 16. When asked whether could have predicted that he’d be where he is in his career, Killam says: “Kind of.”

“I’ll tell you what, I mean, it’s hard to know because we’re tented up and it’s covered, but we’re pretty close to the ice rink here at Rockefeller Plaza,” he explains. “The summer before I auditioned [for SNL] and got the job, my wife [Cobie Smulders] was doing a play here. I looked after our one-year-old child while she was doing that, and then at night, I would go wander the city and do something fun. And every night that I was in the area, I would sit at a bench, literally probably 80 feet there, and stare up at 30 Rock and go, ‘It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.’”

“If you asked me then, there was a lot of manifesting going on,” he adds. “A lot of people-affesting.”

Killam joined the cast of SNL in 2010 before being let go with one year left on his contract in 2016. Killam told Uproxx that year that he wasn’t sure why he was cut from the show.

“I don’t know the other side of it,” he said. “I was never given a reason why, really. I can assume until the cows come home. But I do know I’m directing this movie [Why We’re Killing Gunther, with Arnold Schwarzenegger] and I’ll have two months of post-production that would have bled into the SNL production schedule, so we kind of communicated that.”

“I honestly don’t know what happened on the other side, but I do know we had expressed I have work on this film and in bonding this picture, that has to get cleared with SNL,” he continued at the time. “And then [another offer] came up. I wasn’t going to have to take any time off to do it, but it was a thing that they would have had to okay.”

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In December, Killam appeared on an episode of the Magical Rewind podcast, hosted by Will Friedle and Sabrina Bryan, where he discussed his time on SNL. They wondered if he or any of the writers ever suggested a sketch based on the 2004 Disney Channel movie he starred in called Stuck in the Suburbs, but Killam revealed no one even know he had been in it.

“The first and maybe only time I got called out for it was the first time Miley [Cyrus] hosted,” he remembered, thinking back to March 2011. 

He went on to note that Cyrus remembered him, recalling a Monday pitching meeting the cast did with Lorne Michaels and that week’s host.

“When it came to me, Lorne’s like ‘Taran,’ and Miley’s like ‘Oh, I know who you are, I know who you are. Anything that ever happened on Disney, I know everything about it.’ Which was really funny,” he said.

“And all of these very funny but cynical, too cool for school comedy people are like, ‘What the hell?’ ” he joked. Michaels’ daughter, however, was “very excited” when he joined the show because she was a Stuck in the Suburbs fan.

“That’s the power of Disney!” he added.

SNL50: The Anniversary Special is now available to stream on Peacock.