Alec Baldwin obviously just spends every week at Rockefeller Center in New York, hoping he’ll get the call to make a Trump cameo on Saturday Night Live, but some of the show’s other celebrity cameos still manage to feel fresh and surprising. This past weekend’s appearance from Matt Damon as lifelong sober virgin/Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was a cameo like that, with his role being totally unexpected and a bit more welcome than another round of Baldwin’s Trump (at least for the people who hadn’t been completely burned out on Brett Kavanaugh bullshit from his nightmarish testimony earlier in the week).
As it turns out, Damon’s whole cameo came together in just a matter of hours, with Vulture reporting that co-head writer Colin Jost first asked Damon to play Kavanaugh “after midnight on Friday night.” For those who don’t get the significance of that, Saturday Night Live is a live show that is taped on Saturday, so by the time Damon accepted the invitation and flew from California to New York, it was already late in the afternoon. Eight hours later, he was live on SNL, screaming about how much he liked beer.
It’s a testament to the weight SNL still carries that the show can get a big Hollywood actor like Matt Damon to show up for 13 minutes of work, but it’s also a testament to how much clout Colin Jost apparently has in the entertainment business. Seriously, Matt Damon saw “Colin Jost” on his phone in the middle of the night and didn’t just let it go to voicemail? That’s ridiculous.