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Bobby Moynihan Talks Tracy Morgan, Weirdos, and Why the New ‘SNL’ Cast Has It Easy

The “Saturday Night Live” MVP dishes on “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” and what it’s like to return to Studio 8H.

This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack. Subscribe here to read more like it!

Fans of the NBC comedy series The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins are often confused: No, stars Tracy Morgan and Bobby Moynihan were not on Saturday Night Live at the same time. To be fair, they’re not the only ones who make that mistake.

“I have to correct Tracy a lot, too,” Moynihan told me, laughing. “He’ll go, ‘What’s the sketch we did together?’ And I’m like, ‘That was Horatio, man.’ Happens all the time.”

The duo, who became famous during their respective stints at Studio 8H, are back in Season 2 of Reggie Dinkins, which premiered this week. Also starring Daniel Radcliffe and Erika Alexander, the series descends from the comedic lineage of 30 Rock: jokes fly so fast and pop-culture references are so gloriously random that your head spins trying to keep up with each laugh and blink-and-miss-it cutaway gag.

Radcliffe plays Arthur Tobin, a “serious” documentarian so desperate for work that he, in his mind, stoops to shooting disgraced former football star Reggie Dinkins (Morgan) as he delusionally tries to mount a comeback. Moynihan plays Rusty, Reggie’s ride-or-die former teammate who now freeloads at the Dinkins mansion in exchange for providing Reggie constant company.

It turns out that The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins was rather prescient, at least at looking at the zeitgeist and the film that is currently boiling up the water cooler. Capitalizing on that, the series released a promo for Season 2 recreating a viral scene from You Can See Everything, with Radcliffe channeling Nathan Fielder, Morgan as Elizabeth Holmes, and, in a hilarious reveal at the end of the video, Moynihan as Holmes’ baby.

The send-up was originally planned for an episode later in the season, so Moynihan was relieved they rushed to film it and release it now. Because, c’mon, how comically genius is it to have Tracy Morgan recite the line, “Why would I deceive you?” in his best Elizabeth Holmes cadence.

Moynihan was about 10 minutes into watching You Can See Everything when he had the epiphany that everything about the movie—Fielder moving into Holmes’ house and the complicated, intimate relationship they’d forge while shooting the documentary—was exactly the plot of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. “I was like, this is our show!” Moynihan said. “Daniel texted the team, ‘It’s a Tobinumentary!”

Reggie Dinkins does what other series from the eruditely demented brain trust behind 30 Rock have done so well: tailoring riotously bizarro supporting characters to the very specific talents of the comedy superstars cast to play them. Think Morgan and Jane Krakowski on 30 Rock, Tituss Burgess on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, or Renée Elise Goldsberry on Girls5eva.

On Reggie Dinkins, Rusty is a Bobby Moynihan special: a somewhat pathetic, yet irresistibly lovable beta male whose eagerness to please is rivaled only by his desperation to be liked, a combination that typically makes the bumbling, perennially stained-shirt buddy routinely humiliate himself. The secret sauce that Moynihan adds: Rusty is rarely embarrassed and rather secure, even feeling loved, in a dependence on Reggie that others might judge.

While the show was in development, creators Robert Carlock and Sam Means tweaked Rusty to better suit Moynihan’s particular brand of comedy, he said. “I just feel extremely lucky that I get to play this weirdo.”

Playing the weirdo is where Moynihan feels at home; he’s certainly gifted at it, as evidenced by some of his most memorable characters on SNL, like Drunk Uncle, Anthony Crispino, and Riblet. When asked if it would be nice to play a successful person for once, someone who’s winning, Moynihan doesn’t skip a beat: “I mean, Rusty’s constantly winning. He’s happy.”

A recurring comedy goldmine for Reggie Dinkins is having Rusty casually mention some outlandish thing he’s doing, then the show quickly cuts to hysterical footage of Moynihan acting it out. In the Season 2 premiere, that’s Rusty alluding to becoming a foot model. While filming the sequence, which finds Rusty seductively rolling around on the floor while seductively kicking his legs, Moynihan admits that he was really, for lack of a better phrase, feeling himself.

“I mean, how can you not?” he said. “I asked for satin pajamas, and I was glad they put me in, like, a movie theater vest. I was like, ‘Let me be funny and do some twirls and get this over with, because I feel uncomfortable on the ground.”

Rusty’s feet get a lot of play this season. A former NFL kicker, the only skill he’s ever had—and therefore the only job he’s ever held—is owed to his $1-million-insured foot. Feeling pressure from some of the people in Reggie’s life to prove his worth and maybe even, you know, pay rent at the house, he explores his foot-related options. Karate? A Rockette? Grape stomping to make wine?

A classic Reggie Dinkins cutaway reveals why these are dead ends for Rusty: a karate sparring match sees Rusty decimated by a little girl.

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Moynihan erupted into one of his trademark giggle fits, an almost hyena-like percussion of high-pitched laughs that soundtracked the conversation. He recounted filming that scene with the child actor, finally asking the director to just let her kick him for real, so it wouldn’t look fake and everyone could move on from the stunt-heavy takes.

When I asked what it must have been like for the child actor to be directed to physically kick a famous TV star, Moynihan’s giggles returned.

There was a child on the shoot who got very upset and kept wailing, “I need my mom. I need my mom.” As a father away from his own children while filming the show, Moynihan was immediately concerned and begged someone to help her.

“They said, ‘Honey, what’s wrong? Why do you need your mom? And she literally went, ‘I don’t have any lines, and I don’t get to kick anybody.’” Moynihan said, giggling away. “The most LA, Hollywood thing I’ve ever seen.”

It’s impossible not to notice how warmly Moynihan speaks about his experience on this show. It’s the rare instance of an actor using the word “family” to describe a cast dynamic and having it seem genuine rather than insufferable.

Since they weren’t on SNL at the same time, despite Morgan’s mistaken memory, I asked Moynihan if he remembered when they first met.

Back in 2008, during a late night of working on the show, one of the writers, Bryan Tucker, suggested that everyone go to Dave & Buster’s in Times Square.

“We all were like, ‘Hilarious!’ and went,” Moynihan said. “And when we got there, Tracy was there with his whole family. We were like, ‘What are you doing here?’ He’s like, ‘I’m always here.’”

When they did finally get to collaborate for real on Reggie Dinkins, Moynihan was struck by how Tracy Morgan is Tracy Morgan in every gut-busting, ludicrous, hilarious way you would imagine, but also how profound he is.

“He’s been through a lot,” Moynihan said. “He’s a giant beating heart. I would say we spend about 90 percent of our time off-screen with Tracy just talking about how grateful we should be, how much we should take care of ourselves.”

“It’ll be like, ‘Bob, you gotta take care of yourself, man. We’re very lucky we got this show. We work with people we love,’” he added. “Then: ‘Also, did you know I dated Michelle Obama in high school?’”

Saturday Night Live, of course, routinely comes in and out of both Morgan and Moynihan’s lives. As a matter of fact, my interview with Moynihan came just days after he made a return to Studio 8H.

On the last episode of the sketch show, Moynihan made a surprise appearance in a new installment of the popular David S. Pumpkins Halloween sketch with Tom Hanks, and then reprised his fan-favorite Drunk Uncle character during the episode’s “Weekend Update” segment.

The whole thing came about last-minute, Moynihan told me. He was shooting another episode of Reggie Dinkins in New York and, because he wasn’t working on Friday, booked a last-minute flight back to Los Angeles so that he could spend Halloween with his kids.

Just after he arrived back on the west coast, he received a message from SNL’s stage manager: “Can’t wait to see you this weekend.” “I was like, ‘What’s this going to be?’”

He took his kids to their school’s Halloween parade, and then hopped a flight back to New York.

I wondered what mix of nostalgia and trauma going back to SNL surfaces, I told him.

“That’s absolutely hilarious. It’s different every time, and this was the least amount of trauma,” he said. “It felt very much like a cherry on top of the SNL 50th cupcake, if that makes sense.”

At last year’s star-studded 50th anniversary special, Moynihan had the “insane and also weird” experience of feeling so happy to be home, performing Drunk Uncle again, and then the second he rolled out on stage being absolutely terrified. He wasn’t staring out at the usual studio audience. It was Oprah, Conan, at least a dozen Oscar winners, and just about every Hollywood legend.

This time, however, “it was kind of nice to go back under very low stakes. It was the most silly and most fun I’ve ever been as Drunk Uncle.”

Moynihan, almost a decade after he left SNL, remains an unabashed fan of the show. He was excited to meet the new cast members, though, he said, “They have it much easier than we did.”

Really?

“A billion percent, yes.”

“Everything is emailed to them,” he said, when I asked why. “They don’t have to, like, wait around in fear. You don’t have to sit on the floor in Lorne’s office like a dog anymore. There’s a lot of stuff that’s different. It’s very, like, ‘Hey, there was a pandemic, and we need to treat each other right,’ and that was not the case when I was there.”

I told him that, after his guest appearances Saturday night, there’s been a movement online and on social media campaigning for him to host the show. Especially now that Reggie Dinkins is back and everyone is discovering how funny it is.

“That’s the sweetest,” he said. “I would die, literally. I think I’m too old. I would explode. I saw Betty White do it, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it.”

Still, he acknowledged that “the second you get cast on SNL, you start thinking about, someday, you may host.”

Amidst his trademark giggles, the conclusion: “Who knows.”

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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