Jenna Ortega (and a football man) to host March SNLs
The Wednesday star and Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce will both host the sketch series next month
Saturday Night Live is set to get a little dose of Wednesday this March—and also a very successful football guy will be there—as the NBC sketch series announced its next slate of guest hosts on social media tonight. Adding to the already announced Woody Harrelson—who’ll take on monologue duties on February 25, with Jack White as his musical guest—the series announced that recent Super Bowl victory man Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs will be tackling the job on March 4, while March 11 has been reserved for Wednesday star Jenna Ortega.
Both are first-time hosts; Kelce enters into a very long, very weird tradition of sports stars deciding to try their hand at performing live sketch comedy in front of millions of people with basically no experience, joining the ranks of such sports-star-turned-chuckle-maker luminaries as O.J. Simpson, Peyton Manning, and NASCAR guy Jeff Gordon. (Fun fact: Of all the many sports people to be invited to host Saturday Night Live over the decades, only two have ever made a return engagement: Dwayne Johnson, who skirts the line between actor and superstar anyway—and, weirdly, Charles Barkley, who’s done the gig a massive four times.)
Ortega, meanwhile, is coming off of being generally regarded as the best part of Netflix’s Wednesday, where she stars as an updated version of Charles Addams’ Gothic creation. Having come up young in the Disney mines, Ortega is an old hand at TV comedy; it’ll be interesting to see whether her skill at handling Tim Burton one-liners translates to the always temperamental rhythms of SNL.
Meanwhile, the musical guests for the two shows will be Kelsea Ballerini, who’ll be accompanying Kelce on the 4th, and The 1975, who’ll be playing during Ortega’s episode on the 11th.