Marcello Hernández Is Learning Whether Domingo’s Charm Survives Off SNL

Marcello Hernández

Photo: Ben Soyka / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 19, 1997 Miami, Florida, United States
Occupation	Comedian and actor
Known for	Happy Gilmore 2, 72 HOURS

The character that made Marcello Hernández famous is mostly a reaction shot. Domingo hovers at the edge of a wedding reception while the bride’s friends turn a pop song into a confession of her affair, and the groom slowly works out who the smiling guest is. The joke belongs to the song; the grin belongs to Hernández. On Saturday Night Live, that grin turned a young cast member into the person the audience waited for. The question his last twelve months keep asking is harder: whether the charm holds when there is no sketch around it.

Hernández has an unusual résumé for a sketch comic, because he spent his adolescence trying to become a footballer. He grew up in Miami, his hometown, the son of a mother of Cuban descent and a Dominican father who separated before he turned five. At Belen Jesuit Preparatory School he made the first team of all-Miami-Dade players, and he trained with the Dominican Republic’s youth national team. At John Carroll University, in Ohio, he joined the soccer team as a freshman and lined up in midfield the following season, then walked away after three games to try comedy.

The switch was less abrupt than it sounds. At the university he won a scholarship for his work in theatre, and back home he had already been building an audience with “Only in Dade”, a social-media page that reviewed Miami’s habits with a local’s affection. In 2019, the year he turned 22 (he was born on August 19, 1997), he graduated with a degree in entrepreneurship and communication and moved to New York to work the stand-up clubs. In 2022 Just for Laughs picked him as one of its New Faces of Comedy, and a few months later he joined Saturday Night Live for its 48th season, the first member of Generation Z in the cast.

The early seasons were patient work. On Weekend Update he built The Movie Guy, who previews coming releases before admitting he has not seen any of them, and Grant, half of a couple nobody can believe is together, handing out dating advice beside Jane Wickline’s Alyssa. He hosted a mock talk show as an immigrant father with an endless string of surnames. Spanish kept creeping into the material, and in October 2024 the show let him play Don Francisco in a parody of Sábado Gigante; the real host thanked the program for bringing back memories. A week later Domingo appeared for the first time, in the episode hosted by Ariana Grande, opposite Chloe Fineman’s Kelsey. The character kept returning, each time with a freshly rewritten hit, and Hernández even showed up in character at a Sabrina Carpenter concert in Los Angeles.

Film work followed the television fame rather than preceding it. In Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore 2, released on Netflix in 2025, he played Esteban, the cousin of Bad Bunny’s character, and he took a guest part in the FX series Dying for Sex opposite Michelle Williams. That November he was announced as the voice of Fergus, one of Shrek and Fiona’s sons, in Shrek 5, and the same month his impression of Sebastian Maniscalco on SNL earned a public compliment from Maniscalco himself.

The reviews of his solo work have been kinder to the performer than to the material. Marcello Hernández: American Boy, his first stand-up hour, taped before a hometown crowd at the Olympia Theater in Miami and released by Netflix in January 2026, drew praise for its energy and delivery, yet several critics found it uneven: a comic still deciding between the family storyteller and the culture-clash act, leaning on observations that felt familiar. 72 Hours, the Tim Story comedy in which he plays Nick, the friend organizing a Miami bachelor weekend that Kevin Hart‘s forty-year-old executive joins by accident, gave him his biggest film role and a similar verdict. Critics singled him out as the liveliest thing in a middling film, while Screen Rant argued the script handed him a type rather than a character. That is the trap of a sketch breakout. Domingo works because the audience fills in the rest; a feature or an hour of stand-up asks the performer to supply it.

The summer of 2026 still brought the most public tests of his career. On July 15 he hosted the ESPY Awards at the David H. Koch Theater in New York, introducing himself as the first Latino to host the ceremony in more than 25 years, saluting the immigrant athletes in the room and needling Tiger Woods and Jake Paul; for the Paul joke he pointed to his own father and stepfather in the audience. Nine days later 72 Hours reached Netflix. In September he presented at the Emmy Awards, with his mother, Isabel, as his date.

He is back on Saturday Night Live for a fifth season, now a repertory player, in a cast that lost Chloe Fineman, his partner in the Domingo sketches, along with Bowen Yang and Martin Herlihy over the summer. Hernández said he was excited for Fineman and would miss her on set. Whether Domingo survives without Kelsey is a small question with a bigger one behind it.

Away from Studio 8H he keeps his private life brief in public: he is in a relationship with Ana Amelia Batlle Cabral, an architect from the Dominican Republic, and his family, his mother above all, supplies much of his stand-up.

The next tests are vocal ones. Paramount releases The Angry Birds Movie 3, with Hernández among its new voices, on December 23, 2026, and Universal has dated Shrek 5, where he voices Fergus, for June 30, 2027. Neither shows his face, which may make them the cleanest test yet of whether the timing that sold Domingo belongs to him or to the sketch.

Tags: actors, Kevin Hart, Saturday Night Live, stand-up comedians, Happy Gilmore 2, Marcello Hernández, 72 HOURS

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