rying to find the end of the line outside of the Helium Comedy Club in Alpharetta, Georgia, is nearly impossible right now. You walk for blocks and blocks, passing girls in high heels with Bad Bunny screensavers on their phones, middle-aged couples who drove in from the surrounding suburbs, Southern moms with big hair ready for a night out — all drawn here by the magnetism of Marcello Hernández. Tonight, on a windy evening in March, Hernández is testing out a new set, made up of material he’s rehearsing for his first-ever comedy special, due out later this year on Netflix. The eclectic crowd is proof of just how much Hernández’s career has ballooned as the 27-year-old comedian has leapfrogged his way to stardom on Saturday Night Live. From the outside, it seems like an incredibly fast come-up, achieved through a quick puff of gravelly-voiced charm and loose-cannon spontaneity. But to Hernández, it’s been a gradual build, starting when he first joined the cast in 2022. “Me and Devon [Walker] would be sitting in a dressing room dressed as DoorDash guys, like little pop-in roles,” he says of those early days. “When you’re there a little longer, you get more responsibility.” Now, there are countless SNL characters he’s known for, each one more viral than the last: There’s the hip-swiveling Dominican baseball player gyrating his way into the MLB playoffs (1.6 million views on YouTube), the kid introducing his white girlfriend to his highly critical Latina mom, played by Pedro Pascal in bright-pink lipstick (8.7 million views), and bride-stealing, goatee-wearing lothario Domingo, who is actually “a doctor and randomly a model, and he volunteers with weird, sick animals” (18 million views). In case anyone doubts the man’s range, he’s also been a cicada, a 4.8-magnitude earthquake, and a frozen embryo from Alabama. While he’s proven he can do a little bit of everything, his brand of comedy is distinctly marked by his experience growing up Latino in Miami. You can see that in the sketches he’s in, but also in the ones he’s helped write for Spanish-speaking guests ranging from Bad Bunny to Ana de Armas, who have found someone who understands their cultural lexicon and can add nuance to their roles in a way that’s felt rare on SNL in the past. “Marcello is effortlessly himself, an identity shaped by Latinidad and Miami, strong women, a hungry brain — all of which are evident in a single gesture or look,” Pascal tells Rolling Stone in an email. “I think he’s a star.” Hernández’s next big act is this special, which he’s been writing during breaks from SNL. At Helium, he does three sets back-to-back, playing with the order and adding little bits here and there. “You’re exploring, because these are good crowds,” he tells me the next day when we meet up for lunch at an Italian restaurant near his hotel. “Jerry Seinfeld always said good crowds help you explore, and tough crowds help you edit. So, this was a very exploratory weekend.” It’s hard to imagine Hernández encountering tough crowds these days — he’s reached a point of cultural ubiquity where he gets recognized pretty much wherever he goes. The second he walks into the restaurant, dressed in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, a woman sitting at a nearby table bursts out “I am such a fan! I love you on TV!” Hernández lets out a good-natured, raspy laugh and replies, “Thank you, thank you, that’s very sweet,” which only seems to attract more accidental attention. “You know you can’t mask that voice, right?” our waiter tells him as he brings over menus. “I’m proud of you, brother.” Part of Hernández’s allure is precisely that he seems so approachable. He gives off supreme kid-brother vibes, or, as one Vogue writer put it, “golden retriever energy” — and at the same time channels the class clown every girl had a crush on in high school. (When I tell a few girlfriends I’m interviewing him, the news is met with some version of a squeal heard only at dog frequencies.) He’s five feet eight and stocky (he wasn’t SNL’s Short King ambassador for nothing), with curly hair that seems to get wilder the more energetic he gets, like an ECG for chaos. And though he considers every question seriously, hardly ever breaking eye contact, there’s always a twinkle of anarchy somewhere past his retinas. When the waiter comes by to offer drinks, Hernández grabs my phone and presses pause on my recording, declaring his cocktail order off the record. (It’s a secret for now, but people should know he had two of them.) Despite all the humor and affability, there’s also a side of Hernández that’s intensely work-focused — and he thrives on being in control. He admits interviews are tough for him and jokes that it’s why he brought his longtime friend Alec Sanchez, who has known him since middle school, to our meetup. “This is my emotional support,” he says, gesturing toward Sanchez. Hernández would rather be the interviewer — he’s actually done a few with people like Pitbull and Floyd Mayweather — and prefers to drive the conversation. Plus, there is a sense of gravity as he nears a new career phase with a ton more recognition. He’d be lying if he said he’s not nervous, especially about his upcoming special. “It’s daunting. It’s my wedding,” he quips. “I’m getting married to these jokes, you know? But I’ve been with them for a long time. Once you’ve been with them this long, you’re together.” Hometown Hero A lot of Hernández’s material comes directly from his upbringing. He was born in Miami, the older of two kids. His mom left Cuba as a teenager and moved to the Dominican Republic, where she eventually met Hernández’s father. Hernández is especially close to his mother (she has inspired several sketches), but both parents are fixtures in his comedy. “My mom is a very well-rounded funny, like roast funny, goofy funny. She can be witty,” he says, and then pauses for a second. “And my dad, I think, can only be described as a cartoon character,” he says, laughing, noting that his father is the kind of outgoing guy everyone in the Dominican Republic knows. His parents split up early in his childhood. If Hernández had to put a finger on where his comedic impulse comes from, that might be a start. “My parents get divorced when I’m young, and I’m trying to find some fun in it, you know? It’s not that funny when your parents get divorced and you’re little and you kind of have to deal with it.” But he’s also always been wildly animated, with the inability to sit still. “I’m just a very hyperactive person. When there’s silence, I get uncomfortable.” That kinetic energy meant that in high school, at Miami’s all-boys Belen Jesuit Preparatory School (the same place Perez Hilton and video director Stillz went), he was, admittedly, a bit of a nightmare. “I was using my powers for evil. I was misbehaving in class, trying to get my friends to misbehave, making fun of the teacher,” he says. But one teacher noticed that Hernández had a natural theatricality and urged him to do drama. He finally gave in his senior year. (Sanchez says Hernández blew the other theater kids out of the water: “Marcello comes in and he’s like the best one, the star of the show, playing three different roles.”) “I’m a hyperactive person. In school, I was using my powers for evil, misbehaving in class.” Hernández was also a serious athlete who had been playing soccer since he was four, and he ended up as a midfielder at Division III John Carroll University in Cleveland (“where the whites have a stronghold,” he’s joked in his past stand-up). There, he took a friend to an open-mic night at a comedy club; he did two sets in the same evening. Pretty soon, Hernández was taking a monthly bus to New York City, handing out fliers outside a club in exchange for a five-minute set. “I was on the street selling tickets next to drug dealers,” he says. “I used to have a joke about it: I’d be like, ‘Comedy show.’ And then the guy next to me would be like, ‘Cocaine.’ And he has a better product, let’s be honest.” All the traveling between Ohio and New York got so intense that Hernández made the decision to leave the soccer team. “I cried to my coaches. It was a real sad moment,” he says, laughing now. “You’re, like, breaking up with your wife. I had spent 14 years with this woman, and I had to break up with her for a woman I had just met — and it wasn’t going well!” His mom came up from Miami to see him perform once, but took off before he went onstage. “She cried and she gave me 20 bucks and she left,” Hernández recalls. Yet Hernández did become a regular on the New York City circuit, endearing himself to other comedians and to clubs. In 2022, he was tapped for Just for Laughs, a comedy festival in Montreal, where he thinks SNL casting agents first spotted him. Months later, he was brought in to Rockefeller Center to audition. “I don’t remember many laughs,” he says. “I remember a cough, maybe like someone covering up their laugh.” His first call was to his mother. “My mom started smoking cigarettes again during that moment,” he says. “So did I.” He pantomimes rapid chain-smoking. “She was like, ‘Marcello, how did it go?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, no one laughed!’ And she’s like, ‘Maybe that happens to everybody, I’m going to do so some research!’” Obviously, Hernández nailed it. He made headlines as one of only four Latinos cast on the show in its 50-year history — Chilean-born comedian Horatio Sanz, who joined in 1998, was the first; Fred Armisen, whose mother is Venezuelan, followed in 2002; and Mexican American Melissa Villaseñor became the first Latina cast member on SNL, in 2018. “I was happy to be one of four. It’s not a lot. So, there’s a bit of a responsibility I felt, too,” he says. “But also, it’s like, I can’t not write about what I’m writing about. That’s just what naturally comes to me.” His perspective — and his mass appeal — feels especially significant on television, where Latino representation has been lacking for years. A 2024 study from the Latino Donor Collaborative showed Latinos make up only 9.9 percent of main cast members on scripted shows, despite being nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population. The idea of representation keeps taking me back to something I experienced the night of his show. As I was making my way to the front of the club to pay for my drink, a blond woman with a strong Southern accent reached toward me and yelled, “Excuse me, do you work here?” I stared at her blankly before the server walking next to me — a white man wearing a T-shirt with a logo of the comedy club — asked her what she needed. The interaction jolts me; I keep wondering why she’d assume a Latina woman in the audience worked for her instead of a bearded white guy. I recount the story to Hernández at lunch, and he watches me steadily. His first reaction is to think about the way we all walk through the world with our set of biases and preconceived notions. “I think Latinos do that as well,” he says. Then he starts to smile a bit. “I try my best to avoid any feeling of sensitivity. I think it’s because when I was little, anytime I would feel like I was going through something unjust, my mom would go, ‘Drama, drama, drama!’” he says, breaking into a full Cuban accent with an exaggerated rolling of the tongue. “So I want to do that to you.” His voice gets stereo-level loud as he dives into a bit. “Drama, drama, drama! What happened? Did she take your money? Did she take your child? Did she take your house? So, it was a fantastic night! You had a fantastic night!” “I don’t want to change my voice for anyone. I want to be who I am, always.” We’re both laughing hysterically, but then he grows serious for a second. “I get it, I get it. I’ve been through it,” he says quietly. “I’ve definitely been through like a ‘What are you doing here?’ type of thing. Or when I talk on the phone in Spanish — the looks. The looks you get at the wrong place when you’re screaming at your Cuban mom in Spanish.” Hernández’s humor has never been political or polemical. It seems like he’s always just trying to find the truth and the comedy in his own experiences and those of the people he grew up around. When he does that, a more radical thing happens, whether Hernández intends it or not: It illuminates the interior lives of a large swath of Americans with immigrant backgrounds, perhaps stretching the imagination of narrow-minded viewers. “I wonder if to a wide audience it feels like something new,” Pascal says. “It must. To me, it’s deeply familiar. It’s like someone I’ve always known, who’s made me laugh my whole life, and that’s because he brings every bit of his culture with him.” That kind of representation feels more critical under an administration that has vilified immigrants, painting harsh caricatures of Latino communities in particular. I wonder out loud if any of that makes him think about his work in a different way. “I don’t want to change my voice for anyone,” he says slowly. “I want to be who I am, always, and I think [the special] reflects that. You talk about what you know. So, if there’s something going on in the world and I think that I know about it, I’m going to talk about it. But I don’t try to overstep my bounds.” He pauses again. “But if you are someone that is saying, ‘I hope that Marcello — because he says he’s such a Latino and a kid of immigrants — I hope that he touches on that topic in his special,’ I think you’re going to be fine. You’ll see.” What’s more pressing to him is to keep getting better as a comic and a writer. “I always just try to be like, ‘Focus on the work,’” he says. He tries not to think about the highs and lows too much — though he will share some of the best moments he’s experienced so far. One was when Bad Bunny hosted SNL last October and reprised the “Protective Mom” sketch with Pascal. “I cried that night. That was like a big, full-circle moment, because I admire Benito a lot, the way he works, the type of person he is, and Pedro Pascal … he changed my life with the first ‘Protective Mom’ sketch,” he says. “I look back on my younger self like, ‘You would not believe this.’” A few of his heroes have checked in, too: “Bro, Billy Crystal texted the other day,” he says. “He’s a legend. And I can’t believe that I’ve met Adam Sandler.” He’s heard from Rosalía, who he thinks would be amazing as a host: “Rosalía is funny, dude.” And who’s a host he really vibed with? “I think Charli and I could be friends,” he says. “We got good banter.” He pulls my phone up like he’s leaving Charli XCX a voicemail. “Right, Charli?” The pressure could be a lot for someone as young as Hernández. Along the way, he’ll get some laughs, win some more fans, maybe even get a few people to see other individuals in a new light. But if it ever feels like too much — if he starts to freak out or take himself too seriously or worry about what people think — it isn’t hard to imagine a voice ricocheting in his head: “Drama, drama, drama!” And then he’ll just keep going.