In June of 2012, “Saturday Night Live” executive producer Lorne Michaels made his biannual trip to the iO Chicago Theater to scope out the talent, hoping to find the next Tina Fey or Seth Meyers.
The theater’s co-founder, Charna Halpern, held auditions before Michaels arrived. She’d gathered her 15 best performers, ready to show them off.
But as she walked past the red glow of the ticket sign in the box office, she spotted Cecily Strong — and realized the 28-year-old had skipped out on the auditions.
“You didn’t audition for me,” Halpern said. “We’re getting ready for Lorne Michaels!”
“Yeah, I know,” Strong replied from behind the wooden half-door at the box-office counter, where she sold tickets for the twice-nightly improv shows. “I have some ideas, but I wanted to make sure it was really a great audition before I did it.”
“That’s crazy,” Halpern countered. “You’re one of my best people. Let me see what you have.”
Halpern pulled the performer into her office, and Strong did a bit about an annoying girl at a party, along with a few other short and sweet impressions.
“I told her she had exactly what Lorne is looking for,” Halpern tells The Post.
She was right. Michaels was struck by Strong and hired her to join the cast last season, where she made her mark doing impressions of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Mayor Bloomberg’s animated sign language interpreter, Lydia Callis.
And yesterday, a little more than a year later, NBC announced Strong will be taking a seat at the “SNL Weekend Update” table next to Meyers. Strong will make her coanchor debut Sept. 28 for the show’s Season 39 premiere.
Strong, now 29, has big shoes to fill in a year of major transition for the iconic sketch-comedy show. A whopping six new cast members were announced yesterday, after heavyweights Bill Hader, Fred Armisen and Jason Sudeikis departed last season.
But it’s Strong’s new high-profile position, presenting news satire in the show’s longest-running segment, that has everyone talking. After all, previous “Weekend Update” hosts include Fey, who will be hosting the season premiere (no pressure!); Jimmy Fallon, who will be the new host of “The Tonight Show” early next year; and Amy Poehler, a favorite of Strong’s.
“Every time I’m offered something, I think, ‘What would Amy Poehler do?’ ” Strong told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this summer. “She’s sort of my hero.”
Poehler, who won an Emmy for her role on “SNL,” took her spot next to Fey behind the famous wooden desk after three years as a cast member.
Strong made it there in one quick season.
But she’s no stranger to the news segment. The bit about the girl at a party that Strong performed for Michaels last summer? That character is a regular guest on “Weekend Update” and Strong’s most popular.
The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party is a blathering know-it-all who can always get a laugh out of Meyers with clueless lines like, “There are homeless people out there who can’t even pay their mortgages.”
Although Strong’s rise has seemed quick, the Illinois native has been acting since she was a kid.
Growing up in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, she did professional theater when she wasn’t working part-time at Buzz Cafe in the town’s art district. She started as a dishwasher at the restaurant before graduating to counter service and eventually waitressing.
“I remember her because she had a really tight-knit family,” recalls Buzz Cafe owner Laura Maychruk, who hired Strong in 2000. “Her stepbrother worked here, too, and her dad was a regular customer. I remember Cecily as beautiful, so vivacious and smiling all the time. She had a ton of friends.”
Strong’s high school pals remember her constantly cracking jokes, and when they tuned in last season for her “SNL” premiere, there was one character who was very familiar.
“When she performed the Puerto Rican character [Mimi Morales] on ‘Weekend Update,’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s high school again,’ ” laughs Matt Johnston, a former classmate of Strong’s. “She used to do that character all the time in the lunchroom.”
After high school, Strong attended the California Institute of the Arts, where she graduated in 2006 with a BFA in theater. She eventually returned to Chicago and began performing at both iO Chicago Theater and the famed Second City.
“When she went to ‘SNL,’ it was like, ‘Maybe they got her too early,’” says Kelly Leonard, executive vice president at Chicago’s Second City theater. Strong had only been performing in the theater’s touring group for a year and a half, without even making it to the main stage, where most of their performers are discovered.
But when Leonard watched her “SNL” debut, he says, she “popped off the screen.”
“She strikes me as a combination of Amy and Tina,” he says. “She’s got Amy’s sex appeal and Tina’s dark wit. And all three women have the ability to have their natural likability shine through to the audience and to say truly mean things in a way that will let you say the next thing and not have people gasping in horror.”
Leonard says another key to owning the “Weekend Update” role is unflappable poise and extreme consistency.
“To sit at that desk takes a sense of composure and a master delivery,” says Leonard, who produced Meyers in the 1999 improv show “Pickups & Hiccups.” “Seth doesn’t stumble. You can’t stumble. And you have to have incredible timing and delivery that’s incredibly consistent night after night.”
Luckily, Strong won’t be flying solo just yet.
Meyers will be at the desk with her next weekend and co-hosting “Weekend Update” at least through February, when he begins hosting “Late Night.” And Michaels, who also produces “Late Night,” has said he hopes Meyers will continue hosting “Weekend Update” after the big move.
After the announcement, Meyers tweeted of his new co-anchor: “Very excited about the new Weekend Update co-anchor.” To which Strong responded: “Let’s hope I make it through the first show without barfing or fainting!”
All eyes will be on Strong and the young cast next weekend, as people tune in to see if Michaels is able to reinvent the wheel after last season’s mass cast exodus.
As her tweet implies, Strong is already feeling the pressure.
“We were e-mailing back and forth last night, and she has this fear everyone’s going to be upset, but from what I’ve heard, it’s going to be quite the opposite,” Leonard says. “By far the best actors here have a very healthy amount of insecurity about their own work, and that’s a good thing in the long run. [Stephen] Colbert’s like that, Tina’s like that, and that’s a good thing, otherwise you’d be building comedy monsters.”
Additional reporting by Gregory E. Miller and Lindsay Putnam