Marcello Hernández on Money, His Mother’s Lessons, and Playing the Long Game (Exclusive Interview)

At 29, Marcello Hernández has built the kind of résumé that can take a comedian decades to assemble. Since joining Saturday Night Live in 2022 as its first Gen Z cast member, the Miami-born, Cuban-Dominican comedian has become one of the show’s breakout stars, released his debut Netflix special, Marcello Hernández: American Boy, and expanded into film (Happy Gilmore 2, 72 Hours), voice acting (Shrek 5), and award-show hosting. He also headlined the first all-Spanish comedy show at the Hollywood Bowl and earned recognition as one of TIME’s 2025 Latino Leaders on The Hollywood Reporter’s Latin Power List. His rise may look rapid, but Hernández sees it as the result of playing a much longer game.

That same philosophy shapes how he thinks about money. Hernández recently partnered with Wells Fargo on a Hispanic Heritage Month campaign promoting ExpressSend Mobile, which allows customers to send money to family and friends abroad through the Wells Fargo Mobile app. For Hernández, whose understanding of finances was shaped by his Cuban mother, the campaign’s focus on cross-border support is personal.

“My mom is always on my ass about money. So I think it’s very important to be financially literate, and I’m happy that I can maybe try to make it a little fun to talk about money,” Hernández says. “The stuff about sending money abroad is obviously something that hits home. A lot of Cuban people and Dominican people send money home to their families. So yeah, I think it’s a combination of my mom always being on top of her money, and her spending and sending money home, which is something that any child of immigrants or family of immigrants knows about.”

Raised by a single mom, Hernández learned early that earning money was only part of the equation. He watched her work hard, save even when she wasn’t making much, and find ways to make whatever they had last.

“I’d be up to go to school at 7:30 a.m., and my mom had already been up for three hours because she worked for an international company, so she was working on their hours,” he says. “And so I think that level of work ethic is something that definitely inspired my level of work ethic. My mom is a smart woman. She made me understand the value of a dollar at a young age.”

One memory in particular distilled her lessons about resourcefulness. 

“You know how when you buy Cuban bread it can sometimes get a bit of mold on it if you don’t eat it? So one time I tried to throw it away, and she said, ‘Don’t do that,'” he says. “Then she cut off some of the mold and told me, ‘Put it in a toaster and then you can eat it.’ I think for her it was about teaching me not to be wasteful. So now if I’m ever wasteful, I’ll definitely feel guilty about it. She definitely instilled that in me.”

Her work ethic followed him into his first jobs.

“I worked at the front desk at a gym. I worked as a delivery boy for food. In college, I interned at a comedy club. I used to run food. I used to clean the floors if somebody threw up or something,” he shares. “When you do jobs like that, you just become grateful.”

That background also informs the comedy that made him famous. Hernández doesn’t treat his Cuban and Dominican identity as an assignment or a role to play; he draws from it.

“I think I just talk about what I know, and I know what it’s like to grow up in a Cuban and Dominican household—I’m proud of it,” he says. “I grew up in Miami. A lot of Cuban people influenced me. I look up to a lot of Cuban people. I remember, as a kid, Celia Cruz was a larger-than-life figure, and Gloria Estefan was, too. Even when we went to school, we used to read José Martí poems, and then, obviously, all the Cuban baseball players I’ve been able to meet and see play, and then in my industry, Andy Garcia and Emilio Estefan, who have been kind enough to speak to me. It means a lot to me to connect with the people that come from where my family comes from.”

Those influences range from Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan, and José Martí to Cuban baseball players and artists such as Andy Garcia and Emilio Estefan. But the more specific Hernández gets about his upbringing, the more universal his comedy can feel.

“The more I have hung out with other types of people, the more I’m just observant in general,” he shares. “I think that just because Cubans speak Spanish or Dominicans speak Spanish doesn’t mean we’re different. I think we’re very similar to a lot of people in the U.S., and we have a lot in common. Because of that, my comedy can make anybody laugh sometimes because what I went through, they went through it too. They’re just not from where I’m from. I think that gives me a little bit of hope that everybody is going through similar things at home regardless of what language you speak.”

That balance is at the heart of American Boy. Rooted in Hernández’s Miami upbringing, the special explores being raised by a Cuban single mother, immigrant family dynamics, cultural rituals, and the shock of leaving Miami for college in Ohio. Underneath the jokes is a coming-of-age story about carrying your family and culture with you while figuring out who you are.

The hour-long format also gave audiences something SNL’s rapid-fire sketches couldn’t: time to get to know the person behind the characters.

“You got to spend an hour with me, and I think the beauty of SNL too is that these things are so quick. The sketches are so quick that you can’t really get bored—it’s fast,” he says. “But when you’re doing something for an hour, it was important for the audience to get to know me. When you’re on SNL, you’re playing a lot of different characters, and then sometimes you play yourself on a Weekend Update piece or something. But it was important to me for people to know where I came from, my relationship with my family, and just the way I think.”

Hernández had been working on that material since he was 18. When he shared it with loved ones—including non-Latino friends—he saw how widely the themes could resonate.

“I didn’t want it to feel like it’s a Latino guy talking to American people,” he says. “It’s like we’re all American. We’re all here. We all sometimes live through the same stuff.”

The years behind American Boy mirror the longer journey behind Hernández’s seemingly sudden rise. He started doing stand-up at 18, performing in dive bars and small New York clubs while taking whatever jobs he could to support himself. He sold comedy tickets on the street, worked a headset sales job from his mother’s house during the pandemic, and did service work at a comedy club while continuing to perform.

That persistence eventually put him in the right room. After performing at The Stand, Hernández was selected for a Just for Laughs showcase, where SNL scouts saw him. A comedy-club manager who had watched him hustle also recommended him to the show’s executives, helping lead to the audition that landed him a spot in the cast in 2022.

“The biggest advice I’d give to anyone is you have to go after your passion,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how it works out; do what you love and give yourself a long runway. You have to give yourself a long runway. If it happens before, you could be excited. But if you want it to happen now and it takes longer, you’re going to be disappointed.”

Early in his comedy career, Hernández gave himself 15 years to get where he wanted to go. He made it to SNL in seven—but even that, he knows, can sound impossibly long to someone.

“Seven years feels like a lot. I think if you tell an 18-year-old right now that things are going to change in seven years, they’re going to be like, ‘What? Seven years? That’s forever,'” he says. “But I think that delayed gratification is a really big thing that I am grateful that I got, and I got it from listening to people that were big and learning about how many years it took them to get to where they got.”

It is also where his approach to comedy and money fully converge. Both require patience, sacrifice, and faith in progress that may not be immediately visible.

“Financial literacy is also about making sacrifices in the short term to be able to enjoy your long-term life,” Hernández says. “And so I think it all goes hand-in-hand. I think anytime you look at something like, ‘I don’t care how long it takes, I’m just going to do it because I know it’s best for me,’ that’s a mentality that I subscribe to. It doesn’t need to happen right now. I need to get 1% better as often as possible.”

The prosaic jobs and uncertain years did more than lead Hernández to success. They gave him proof that he could continue through fear, insecurity, and disappointment—and something meaningful to say to anyone still in that stage.

“I did things that weren’t pretty, and at the time it wasn’t glamorous, and I didn’t feel super proud of myself sometimes because I wasn’t doing stuff that was cool or traditionally an attractive job,” he says. “But now the fact that I did those jobs is what gives me the confidence to push through it. I went through every emotion for this. I’ve been through sadness and happiness, and fear, and insecurity, and every emotion pursuing this thing. So nobody can really take that away from me. You can’t say I didn’t work my ass off.”

“Some people maybe just need to hear, like, yo, I know this sucks right now, but those experiences that you’re having now are what you’ll talk about when you are comfortable and successful,” he says. “You’re going to talk about these moments, the stuff that you did that was hard and was tough.”

For comedians waiting for their breakthrough, Hernández returns to advice from a comedian he knows that turns patience from passive waiting into a daily practice.

“There’s this comedian, his name is Comedian CP, and he said something the other day that really hit me hard, and I think more people should hear it, and that is that every comedian is one joke away,” Hernández says. “I think once you know that, every day is an opportunity to find that joke … If you know you’re just one joke away, how can you not spend every day looking for it?”