Bowen Yang welcomes Jake Gyllenhaal to SNL with a dramatic reading about Peeps
Camila Cabello, last seen in perilous proximity to James Corden's "thrusting mouse crotch," is this week's musical guest
In the promos for this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang welcomes host Jake Gyllenhaal by butchering his last name, and with an impromptu reading of Marshmallow Peeps 2: Where My Peeps At? (We can probably do without any more related material there.)
Gyllenhaal is returning to host for the first time in 15 years, and the potential for a good show is high, if the writers have better stuff for him than they did for Jerrod Carmichael last week. Gyllenhaal was super-comfortable in his 2007 hosting stint, exhibiting a previously unseen versatility. (I mean, if you’re the onetime hopeful Prince Of Persia, you really can’t show much more commitment to the SNL experience than doing the monologue in drag and singing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”) He’s since popped up in a cameo role in “Airport Sushi,” one of John Mulaney’s signature musical sketches. It’s surprising the show hasn’t had him back more.
Gyllenhaal’s film profile has faded a bit while his Broadway résumé has grown—this is a man from whom the theater kid can’t be extracted—and it’s a safe bet we’ll see more musical sketch material this week. On the musical guest front, pop princess Camila Cabello is plugging her new album Familia, which is out today. Cabello may show up in sketches herself, having starred in 30 Rock vet Kay Cannon’s remake of Cinderella, in which critics felt Cabello acquitted herself well but couldn’t erase the horror of James Corden’s “thrusting mouse crotch.”
(Sidenote/flashback: For some reason, during the pandemic I found myself revisiting a bunch of the old “Bronx Beat” sketches, one of which aired on Gyllenhaal’s episode. Man, were Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph next-level in those. Maybe it’s because I’ve known my share of these aspirationally saintly, perpetually aggrieved matriarchs, but Poehler and Rudolph’s interplay was just gold. The current cast doesn’t play off or with each other nearly as well as these two. Many weeks, cast members seem to be operating from individual silos—what original SNL writer Marilyn Miller called “boutiques” in the Live From New York book—no doubt a function of the currently huge number of regulars.)