Aubrey Plaza will host Saturday Night Live this weekend, although as she told Fallon on Monday night, her SNL debut might have come much earlier if she hadn’t failed her audition “trying to sex up the news.”
“I didn’t make it to the Lorne [Michaels] audition, the famous final audition, but I did a preliminary first-round showcase,” she said on The Tonight Show. “I remember one character I did was like a Puerto Rican news reporter that was always trying to make all of the news stories sexy, even if they were horrific news stories. I was just trying to like, sex up the news or something.”
Another character was “a pill-popping housewife that had a show called Celebri-Tails, where I would just name celebrities and name what kind of tail they would have if they had a tail. Like I would say, ‘Lindsay Lohan would have a bushy squirrel’s tail.’ Or, like, ‘Bill Clinton would have a polar bear’s nub.’”
Plaza is one of the most famous alumni from the NBC Page Program, and she also spoke about working on Saturday Night Live as an intern in the design department in 2004 and 2005. “They loved me,” she said to Fallon’s surprise. “They loved me because I did not care about set design at all, and they wanted an intern who had no interest in learning what they did because they were moody bastards.” As Fallon laughed and agreed — he remembered the team she spoke of — Plaza added, “You know that’s true. In fact their office was labeled ‘The Moody Room.'”
Her work experience did not include any face time with the cast. “I didn’t talk to the cast because I was an intern, I was stalking, lurking in the shadows,” she said. “I studied like a sponge. I was like a creepy stalker. Now I’m going to host it so my master plan worked.” Check out her Tonight Show appearance below.
Plaza will host SNL on January 21st, in an episode featuring Sam Smith as the musical guest. Last year, she was seen in Emily the Criminal, Spin Me Round, and the highly-lauded Season 2 of The White Lotus. Revisit our list of “15 Times Aubrey Plaza Was Iconic.”
