SNL's Heidi Gardner Left the Stage with 'Anxiety' After Breaking So Hard in Beavis and Butt-Head Sketch

A long-awaited Saturday Night Live sketch came to life this weekend, but it was not without its challenges.

The Beavis and Butt-Head skit saw Heidi Gardner play a news anchor grilling a professor (Kenan Thompson) on the dangers of artificial intelligence before two audience members, Jeff (Mikey Day) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) distracted the course of the interview due to their striking resemblance to to the '90s cartoon characters.

In the skit, Thompson requests that both Jeff and Dean move from where they are seated in the audience as their looks are distracting him, and when Gardner, 40, turned around to address Jeff, she broke character at the ridiculousness of his costume.

"I just couldn't prepare for what I saw," she told Vulture of the skit. "I really tried. I even saw Mikey out of the corner of my eye seconds before I went live. I saw the red shorts. I knew I couldn’t look over there again. Mikey even told me later that he was bending down and hiding himself so I wouldn’t see him.”

Despite the fact that she'd run through the skit in the dress rehearsal — and had "lost it" during that take, too — Gardner could not manage through the script without laughing.

"I’m thinking about it right now and laughing. I recovered and tried to tell myself in between dress and the live show, 'You can’t laugh like that again.' I was trying to imagine seeing him in my head so I was prepared for it," she recalled.

Gardner revealed that the skit is one that has been "put up at table reads and rehearsals for about five years," but had never made it to the live show until this weekend. She told the outlet she'd "coached [herself] for so many years to not break," but Day, 44, was a particularly difficult scene partner.

"Mikey and I sit next to each other during table reads, and he makes me laugh a lot. It’s easy for us to mess with each other. Something in the way he moved on live television felt like when someone messes with you to make you laugh," she explained.

Once she exited the stage, Gardner admitted she was "a little bit in shock."

"Then the anxiety set in and I was like, ‘Oh my God, was that okay?’  I had some friends in my dressing room, and they were like, ‘Of course, it was okay,'" she recalled to the outlet, though the reassurance — and praise from "so many other writers and cast members" after the show — didn't clear her conscience.

“It’s really hard for me to give myself any sort of credit because I didn’t do the job," she admitted.

“I hope, for those guys and their portrayals of Beavis and Butt-Head, that it helped how shocked I was by how funny they were. And I hope it helps people think of the sketch. I’ll never be able to shake looking over my shoulder and seeing what I saw. That’s really special."

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