Olivia Rodrigo hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time Saturday, pulling double duty as she was also the musical guest, the third time that has happened this season.
The pop star, who had appeared as a musical guest on the show twice before (in 2021 and 2023), opened her monologue by announcing that her favorite SNL cast was the one she watched as a teenager. “Mine is Mikey Day, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson and Chloe Fineman,” Rodrigo said, naming four current cast members who, she said, “all came back this week just to cheer me on. How sweet is that?”
Rodrigo also poked fun at her own album titles. “My last two albums were called Sour and Guts, and this new one is called You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” she said. “So I learned more words, guys!”
She also leaned on her Disney days for one of the monologue’s biggest jokes. “When I was 13, I was on a Disney show called Bizaardvark, and we had an incredible cast, which included acting legend Jake Paul,” Rodrigo said. “And we’d always talk about our futures, me and Jake. I’d say, ‘I really wanna create music that explores the complexities of girls my age,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, one day I really wanna beat up old guys on Netflix.'”
Before mocking her time on the Disney Channel, Rodrigo reached further back to her start in commercials. “When I was 6, I had my first-ever acting job in an Old Navy commercial,” she said, before the show rolled a fake outtake in which a young Rodrigo tells the camera, “That’s not my real mom. I want to go to the Gap.” She also briefly nodded to a 2024 onstage fall during her tour: “There are so many highs on tour … and there was one notable low.”
Rodrigo closed the monologue with a parody of “Drivers License,” the 2021 single that launched her career. Instead of getting her license, she sang about getting her California Real ID. “I got my Real ID last week, showed up at the DMV. I sat there waiting 14 hours, with nine forms to prove it’s me,” Rodrigo sang. By the song’s bridge, she was rattling off everything the DMV worker demanded: “This lady wants my passport, my W-2 and my first-born son, my gas bill, my body count, bra size, how long will this be?”
An Aziz Ansari cameo
Cast member Ashley Padilla opened the show in character as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, introducing Colin Jost as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Aziz Ansari then made a cameo appearance as FBI Director Kash Patel, riffing on last week’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting and the alleged gunman’s writings, which named every Cabinet member as a target except Patel. “You get a shout-out like that in a psycho’s manifesto, you must be doing something right,” Ansari’s Patel said.
A musical sketch about an alien zoo
Rodrigo also led an original musical sketch in which she sang about her “perfect bedroom” before the camera pulled back to reveal she was an exhibit at a zoo on the “bug people planet.”
“Every day when the sun comes up, the bug people come and look at me,” she sang. “They watch me through my boy band posters, beady eyes all in a row. Then they sit on bleachers while I use the toilet. When I flush, they clap like the dolphin show.”
The sketch escalated into a fake League of Their Own-style movie the bug people had remade for themselves (“There’s no crying in Osborne”), a “potential mate” delivered by claw machine and a final reveal that Rodrigo’s character would be relocated to “a life of luxury in the royal palace.”
A satire of TikTok street interviews
The episode also produced a fake commercial for “Safeguard,” a home security company whose pitch was designed for the social media age: When your alarm goes off, the company sends a TikToker to interview the intruder using the kinds of viral street-interview questions familiar from feeds like “body count” debates and “gay son or thot daughter” prompts.
The fake commercial promised the resulting clips were “guaranteed to go viral,” with each plan tied to a different style of internet content. The sketch ended with a punchline that New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker had been breaking in weekly to get on camera.
Two new songs and an introduction by a rock icon
Rodrigo’s musical performances were the night’s headline beats. She first performed “Drop Dead,” the lead single from her upcoming third studio album, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April and gave Rodrigo her fourth chart-topping debut. Blondie singer Debbie Harry introduced the performance.
Her second performance was a debut: a previously unreleased ballad called “Begged,” introduced by Heated Rivalry star and former SNL host Connor Storrie. Rodrigo had teased earlier in the week that she would perform a new song.
What’s next
Rodrigo’s third studio album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, is out June 12. She announced her Unraveled tour on Thursday, with 65 arena dates across North America, Europe and the U.K. The tour begins Sept. 25 at PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford, Conn.
SNL returns May 9 with Matt Damon hosting and Noah Kahan as musical guest.
