Marcello Hernández arrived at Amy Poehler’s podcast studio on a bike, one hand gripping the handlebars, the other steadying a vase of sunflowers he had ridden across New York City to deliver. ‘They remind me of you,’ he told her. ‘You brighten so many people’s life.’ The flowers were enormous. He admitted his assistant had been in a car behind him the whole time, carrying them safely. It was the kind of entrance that tells you everything about a person before they say another word, and it set the tone for one of the warmest, most genuinely chaotic conversations the podcast has produced.
Poehler had done her homework, or at least her research call. Fellow SNL cast member Sarah Sherman joined by video ahead of time and gave a pre-interview so effusive it practically embarrassed itself. Sherman described Hernández as ‘menchy,’ recalled him showing up at her office at 10 p.m. during a hiatus to demand she go do stand-up sets, and confirmed the backflip stories are real. During a Sebastian Maniscalco sketch, she said, ‘he did a back handspring like a Russian teenage gymnast.’ He also, she noted for the record, once heard her joke that she wanted a Beats pill speaker and then actually bought her one. ‘It was like four minutes ago he was giving me a wedgie,’ she said, ‘and now I have a $300 speaker in my office.’
From Miami outfield cartwheels to a comedy scholarship in Ohio
Hernández grew up in Miami, half Cuban and half Dominican, and his parents had one consistent parenting strategy: get him tired. Baseball failed because the ball never reached him in the outfield and he started doing cartwheels and studying insects instead. His mother pulled him from the sport on the grounds that it was, in her words, making the family look bad. Soccer worked. He became a winger, ran constantly, came home exhausted, and played through college at John Carroll University in Ohio, where his mother had steered him after vetoing a California school on the basis that it was too far for her to visit easily.
The turn toward comedy came when a drama teacher offered him three days out of school to compete in Tampa if he memorized two contrasting monologues. He chose a devastating piece about a boy who finds his brother’s gun, followed immediately by a John Leguizamo bit about a Cuban cabana boy falling for an older American woman at a hotel. He won. Back at college, a film professor named Bob Null told him to rewrite his favorite comedy as a writing exercise. He rewrote ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ with a woman as the lead. He also took a Shakespearean performance class from a teacher named Bo Smith, whose partner Tom Ro ran the class with him. When students were performing timidly one evening, Bo Smith, then in his late sixties, quietly removed his tie and necklace, got on his knees, and performed King Lear from memory until the room was transformed. Hernández has since started a scholarship at John Carroll in Bo and Tom’s name, because Tom has since passed. Two recipients so far have met with him and Bo in Cleveland. ‘I found him in Cleveland, Ohio,’ Hernández said, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who went looking.
The SNL audition, the wrong wig, and the Domingo sketch that nobody planned
For his SNL audition callback, Hernández stood in a dressing room at 30 Rock with headphones in, listening to a brass-heavy cover of ‘Always Be My Baby’ by Mariah Carey on repeat. He had his back to the door. A woman from the talent team had been trying to get his attention for several minutes before he turned around. He was then informed he should get makeup on. It was, he confirmed, his first time. The room was cold and quiet during his set. A few weeks later, the call came through at his friend’s apartment. He called his mother and they cried. Then he announced he was going to make a million dollars. ‘It turns out,’ he said, ‘that you don’t make that.’
The ‘Domingo’ sketch, the recurring bit that became a genuine cultural moment, was not his idea. Writers Kira O’Sullivan and Jimmy Fowlie built it. Ariana Grande, he insisted, is the one doing the impossible work: singing badly, on purpose, with discipline. ‘To like sing bad on purpose,’ he said, ‘and she does it so good.’ His own contribution was a small goatee, a variation on his actual hair, and what he described as ‘a very catchy tune.’ Poehler gently pointed out it was one of the biggest pop songs of the era. ‘Some of the time that we are in,’ he allowed.
Sherman’s third and most pointed question, delivered through Poehler, was whether Hernández could accept that he is a genuinely good writer. He went quiet for a beat, then said he is planning to take a sketch writing class this summer because watching cast members who came up through improv and sketch still makes him athletically jealous. ‘I just have jokes,’ he said. ‘And so I’m learning.’
The sunflowers, still in the vase
The flowers sat on the studio floor for most of the conversation, relocated there after the vase proved too large for any available surface.
By the time Hernández finally agreed to leave, a viewer in the live chat had sent a $500 super chat from an account called Lizard King 45 to beg him to stay. He thanked them by name. He had already delivered a full tribute to Poehler’s career, called out her dented laptop and sticky phone as affronts to human dignity, done an impression of Sebastian Maniscalco commenting on the state of her equipment, explained the generational theory that places him culturally as a young boomer despite his technical Gen Z birth year, and performed a minute-long improvised expert lecture on penicillin that held together until he introduced the fictional inventor Jeffrey L. Sillin with the words ‘and he goes, what are we going to do?’ He was, as Sarah Sherman had predicted, having an excellent time.
