“We try to do this in the SNL hiatus,” Thompson told Parade.com in this exclusive interview. “There was some crossover in the first season and much less in the second season. But we make it happen. It’s a lot, but at the same time it doesn’t go on for forever, so there’s a chunk of time. It’s nice if everybody can support that daddy’s got to go work basically. And then we can enjoy the chunk of time when daddy’s around getting on everybody’s nerves.” If you look back to the beginning of Thompson’s career, he wasn’t an overnight success. His first break came when he was cast on the 1990s Nickelodeon ensemble sketch series All That before joining Kel Mitchell to star in the spinoff Kenan & Kel. But it was quite a while between the latter series and joining the cast of SNL. As a result, Thompson says that he is 1,000 percent more grateful for his success because it was a while in coming. “Usually when people have things either handed to them often or too quickly, they don’t really have a gauge of what they’re supposed to appreciate about something, or they don’t appreciate it at all,” Thompson said. “Sometimes you can’t even really blame them because they don’t know the difference, or they have never really experienced what it is like to be on the other side of that coin because they just don’t have any perspective. For me, it is the opposite. I know all the sides of the coin. And I know how to treat people, how I want to be treated, and how I want people to view the work that I do and all of that. I take it all very seriously.” Even with the success of SNL to his credit, it took several attempts at developing Kenan before they got it right and made the Not Ready for Primetime Player actually ready for primetime. “The thing about SNL is that we don’t necessarily have that much time to sit with material and really think: Is this the best version of things?” Thompson said. “We usually just have to get it done because Saturday is coming. But to have the opportunity to go back in and re-discuss things is just great, which led to a casting change [with Don Johnson replacing Andy Garcia] that I think really gelled the show in a really solid way. So, I think we were lucky that we were able to re-approach things.” In Kenan, Thompson plays a single dad, who is juggling his job as host of an Atlanta morning show Wake Up With Kenan!, while raising two pre-teen daughters—the too smart Aubrey (Dani Lane) and the silly, unpredictable Birdie (Dannah Lane), after the death of his wife a year earlier. “I pulled it all from my life except the widower part,” Thompson says when asked how much reflects his real life. “It’s only me imagining how heartbreaking it would be to be in that situation to lose my best friend, and stuff like that. Everything else, I’m definitely pulling from my real-life experience as far as what to do when frustrations mount.” In this interview, Thompson also dived into how much the show will try to deal with social issues as they make the audience laugh, the pressure of having his name as the title of the show, what Don Johnson adds to the cast, and how Thompson juggles Kenan with SNL. Is this a series that’s just going to go for the funny, or is it also going to try to deal with social topics through humor? I think there’s a mixture of both. It’s more focused on the family life and the social issues that come into it. But we are definitely focusing on the humor and the funny. I don’t know if necessarily lighter topics is the right way to say it, but it’s more about what’s going on with a guy and his kids, basically, than tackling the broader spectrum of things. But we will definitely get to that, I’m sure. An interesting bit of casting on your show is the young ladies—Dani and Dannah Lane—who play your daughters are actually real-life sisters. Was that a fluke? Did they read separately? We were looking for twins at first. And then I saw them and I was like, “Are they twins?” And they were like, “No, they’re sisters but they’re one year apart.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s great. Either way it goes, that will totally work to play my girls.” A twin is one thing, because, of course, you expect to go through life with your twin. But for sisters that are not twins, it must be such a cool thing to experience working together on a big, giant job that you’ll be able to look back on and hopefully be proud of as they go through life, and can say, “We had that moment in time when we both worked on the same project.” To me that was such a cool story. Was there a learning curve for you in going from Saturday Night Live, which is a sketch show, to being No. 1 on the call sheet on a half-hour comedy? It’s a lot of responsibility; it’s a lot of pressure. And they couldn’t have put more pressure than by naming the show after me. You’ve got to step up to the plate when people are gesturing towards you like that. It was originally called Saving Larry, and I was totally fine with that. But if people think it makes more sense to just really put me on blast, then I’ve got to go with that because that’s the job basically at the moment. That’s the job that I’ve agreed to do, you know what I’m saying? And that I want to get done as well. So, however, we get it done, as long as it makes sense and nobody’s necessarily playing with my name, then I’m all good. You would think Lorne Michaels knows what he’s doing. One thousand percent. And everyone else that’s involved. There’s a lot of brilliant minds at NBC and Universal, and a lot of brilliant minds in our showrunner and writing department as well. I feel like I’ve been definitely blanketed in professionals, and it’s been my job to perform the funny and bring that forward. Did COVID have anything to do with the fact that you don’t have a studio audience? It didn’t. It only made things logistical basically as far as safety and protocols is concerned. But the show was decided to be a single camera before COVID actually happened. There’s not a lot of multi-cams on NBC, so Kenan fits the mold of the current shows and the look of what’s actually on the network. The majority of the cast is Black, talk about having Don Johnson, who plays your live-in father-in-law Rick, as the one white character. You know, it’s another reflection of my life. My father-in-law’s Italian, rest in peace. But, yeah, he’s different from my people, so it’s like an experience that I have really lived but also haven’t really seen explored on television yet. So, it was a chance for us to do something different, to stand out and push that conversation as well. What kinds of conversations do you have? Most of Don’s success came from shows like Miami Vice or Nash Bridges, not comedies. But he was this huge TV star. Do you talk about how to deal with fame or any of the stuff that comes with successful TV series? Not necessarily. He likes to tell stories of the times, and how he always felt very lucky to be doing the job that we do but also come through the era that he came through. Because everybody would just walk into each other’s lives like it was no big deal. And everybody was supportive of each other or were around each other, spending a lot of quality time around each other. There weren’t so many distractions and stuff like that. So, he definitely talked about those being the good old days-ish, but also just the overall appreciation of working in the biz. Kenan returns with all new episodes on Jan. 3 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Next, The Cast of All That: Where Are They Now?
