- The Anora star hosted the show for the first time
- She played a teenage girl in the cold open
- Her monologue contained references to her learning to pole dance for the film
Fresh from her triumph at the Oscars earlier this month, Mikey Madison made her SNL hosting debut this weekend.
During her first time on the show, she was part of a sketch parodying the Signal group chat incident that was in the news this week. This occurred when senior Trump officials accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to a private chat on messaging app Signal. He then saw them sharing classified information.
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SNL made fun of this in a sketch where Trump administration figures crashed a group chat full of teenage girls. Madison played a girl talking about boys and another teenage concerns before Pete Hegseth (Andrew Dismukes) appeared.
“FYI, green light on Yemen raid. Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago. Who’s ready to blast some Houthi rebels?” he said, adding multiple flag emojis and an eggplant emoji to the message.
JD Vance (Bowen Yang) dialed in from Greenland in a nod to his awkward trip there.
“How’s Greenland? I bet you’re killing it,” said Hegseth.
“I’m not. Nobody knows why I’m here, especially me,” replied Yang, adding “But praise Trump, our work here is mysterious and important,” in a nod to Severance.
Madison then said: “Got to go, Matt’s here to pick me up. We’re going to a movie.”
“Who? Gaetz?” asked Hegseth. This referenced the investigation conducted into former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz following allegations of sex trafficking involving a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz has denied the allegations.
“Actually, yeah!” Madison said.
“So hard to believe that I was homeschooled right?”
In her opening monologue, the Anora star joked that after such a “crazy month” with her Oscars success, her plans in April involve “going to bed”.
“As you can tell, I have a pretty relaxed vibe in real life, and I try to incorporate that into all my roles,” she said. This segued into a highlight reel featuring her swearing, kicking and screaming in Anora, being incinerated by Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and being shot and then falling into an open stove flame in Scream 5. “Just to clarify, those were two different characters who were lit on fire, and that’s range,” she added.
As a “very proud, self-proclaimed horse girl,” Madison also made fun of doing a couple’s costume with her horse as a child. “We were jailbirds arrested for the crime of stealing each other’s hearts. I know, it’s so hard to believe I was homeschooled, right?”
Towards the end, she poked fun at people who didn’t believe she’d done her own pole dancing during Anora.
“I performed all my own stunts for the film, including all the dancing, so it does kind of bother me when people assume it wasn’t actually me on the pole, ’cause it was. I can prove it right now,” she said. After saying she “hadn’t done this in a while”, the camera moved on to a muscular person in Madison’s same dress doing handstand pushups and scaling the pole.
How many Oscars did Anora win?
Just a few weeks ago, Anora pulled off an upset at the Oscars. It won five awards, including the gong for Best Picture. Director Sean Baker broke an Oscars record, becoming the first person to personally win four Academy Awards for a single film.
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Madison herself scooped the prize for Best Actress, beating frontrunner Demi Moore for The Substance.
