If there is one thing Ryan Gosling will continue Saturday Night Liveit is break character.
When hosting SNL For the third time this weekend, the 43-year-old Barbie The actor did what he does best at Studio 8H – aside from making people laugh – and broke character in almost every single skit as he just couldn’t contain his giggles on stage.
Viewers knew from the first moment in the cold opening – bringing back the iconic “Close Encounters” sketch and former cast member Kate McKinnon – that they were in for an unforgettable show as things quickly spiraled into hilarious madness.
The sketch – originally with McKinnon, Gosling and Cecily Strong – The focus is on three friends who were abducted by aliens and must answer questions from government investigators about the encounter. While Strong’s character was replaced by a new abductee, played by current cast member Sarah Sherman, Gosling and McKinnon both reprized their roles as friends taken to the stars by the aliens.
As always, Gosling’s character had a normal and peaceful interaction with the aliens, as did Sherman’s, while McKinnon – the oddball of the group – had an experience that was “a little different.” At one point in the skit, as McKinnon demonstrated her own experiences on the spaceship, she got between Gosling’s legs and pawed around while the audience responded to the situation with laughter that was only exceeded by Gosling himself, who had to lower his head.
Watch “Close Encounters” and Gosling’s hysterical breakthrough in the player below:
Elsewhere in the episode Gosling and actors Bowen Yang tried to suppress their laughter during the “Doctor” skit, in which they played medical professionals delivering news to a patient’s family after surgery. There, The Guy case Star wore a blonde wig with terrible bangs and struggled to keep a straight face as the bangs ended up in his mouth.
The actor and the SNL The star fed each other “cookie sprinkles,” an invention of Yang’s character in the skit when “you don’t want a whole cookie,” and tried to calm the patient’s family. Her antics ended up causing the skit’s other participants, Heidi Gardner, Andrew Dismukes, James Austin Johnson and Chloe Troast, to burst out laughing as well.
Another breaking point for the guest host and cast came during the Beavis and Butthead Parody, where The notebook The actor played a town hall panelist who bore a striking resemblance to Beavis, so much so that the moderator asked him to move as he was distracting the speaker (Keenan Thompson).
We would be happy to meet you, Beavis Gosling walked away but was replaced by a butt-head look-alike (Mikey Day), which the announcer found equally distracting. At some point even SNL Veteran Gardner had to stop the sketch because she was laughing too loudly after turning in her chair to face Day, who characteristically looked like his animated counterpart.
The skit ended with Gosling and Day – both acting as if they didn’t know who Beavis and Butt-Head were – sitting next to each other, much to the dismay and distraction of Thompson’s character.
“You put them right next to each other?” Thompson said, with Gosling sitting behind him in the frame, desperately trying to hide his laughter. “See, they even sit there like they do in the show.”
The shenanigans didn’t stop there, as Gosling and Chloe Fineman – who also appeared in the series Beavis and Butthead Sketch and Broken Character – a parody of a deleted scene from Julia Roberts’ classic film, Erin Brockovich.
While Fineman took on the role of Roberts, Gosling played the role of Aaron Eckhart’s George, recreating the couple’s first meeting after George made too much noise on his motorcycle.
Midway through, Gosling’s fake mustache began to fall off, leaving him and Fineman barely able to hold it together, while Thompson came into play as a cut-off character who joined in on the joke aimed at Erin’s number monologue from the 2000 film.
In one of the last two sketches, Gosling played a happily married man from Tennessee who was out on the town with two of his friends – played by Thompson and Marcello Hernandez – with Gosling and Hernandez trying to convince their friend to go after the handle to go to the clubs for dinner and drinks.
After the waitress (Sherman) commented on their accents, there was a hilarious moment that drew both laughter and applause as Thompson’s character told her where they all came from and where her accent came from.
“I’m Dominican, he’s Cuban,” Thompson said, pointing at Hernandez before turning to Gosling and saying, “And he’s from Tennessee, but since he married a Cuban woman, he’s different.”
“A Cuban woman changed you,” Gosling said.
The line appears to be a playful reference to the actor’s real-life partner, Eva Mendeswith whom he has two daughters.
Finally, this La La Land The actor played a not-so-happily engaged man who begged his boyfriend (Dismukes) to help him escape after proposing to his girlfriend (Fineman), but immediately regretted it.
In one part of the nearly six-minute sketch, Gosling attempted to convince Dismuke’s character with $12,000 to meet him in Istanbul so he could start a new life from scratch.
“I’m going tonight,” he said, as the audience laughed heartily and Dismukes replied, “Why are you doing this?”
The shock and uneasiness on his scene partner’s face as he repeatedly admitted that he had left his fiancée in the middle of the night caused Gosling to break down again, giggling slightly while remaining mostly composed, even as Dismukes stumbled.
Check out “The Engagement” in the player below:
Goslings Saturday Night Live The episode is now streaming in full on Peacock.
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