This holiday season, Saturday Night Live served up a potent reminder: “The only person you need to be is yourself.” So waxed the poster for the 2001 classic Save the Last Dance, in which Julia Stiles finger-pointed her way into Juilliard. During Weekend Update, Chloe Fineman shed her Mrs. Claus jacket and stretched her body as she prepared to demonstrate her one sexy gift idea. Stripping down to a black leotard and pleather joggers, her blond hair pulled into a sleek ballet bun, she suggested wowing your partner with the choreography from Stiles’s last scene in her iconic movie. (Michael Che, for one, was rapt.) After Fineman explained the art of street ballet, which involved a series of “hip hop… hop” moves, the crowd burst into the largest applause of the night when a good-natured Stiles, clad in her dance blacks, joined Fineman on stage.
All you kids out there who will spend your Sunday sharing clips of this week’s musical guest, Olivia Rodrigo: put some respect on your mother’s teenage dream of being Stiles. May this very sweet and very shrewd late-night moment bring its own kind of Christmas present to the now 42-year-old actor.
All that sugar, and we haven’t even gotten to the great hunk of strange beef that was our host, Adam Driver. On SNL, he’s like Christopher Walken crossed with Bill Murray, cut with a dash of Marlon Brando. The weirder the sketch, the more serious and committed his performance. Put this man’s Rushmore-sized head on top of a baby’s body, like in the Baby Plane sketch, and he’ll squall, suck on his bottle and grunt while going poo in his diaper with the commitment of a Shakespearean actor.
The Ferrari actor’s monologue was as commanding as it was odd, like a slightly depressed vaudevillian star. He sat down to the grand piano, stopping to admire the girth of his hands, to compose his Christmas list. “Hi, Santa. It’s me, Adam. Driver. From the Nice List, and also Girls.” His wants were few, but meaningful. Now that he’s middle-aged (wait, what?), he wanted five pairs of chinos and a monster truck to balance out his micro penis (wait, what?). And could Santa somehow put an end to all those folks who stop him on the street asking how he could’ve killed Han Solo? “I didn’t kill Han Solo,” he argued. “Wokeness killed Han Solo.”
Karen Valby
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