“Saturday Night Live” hair stylist Jodi Mancuso and makeup artist Louie Zakarian recently told The Ankler (via People) that the now-iconic Beavis and Butt-Head sketch with Ryan Gosling and Mikey Day was originally pitched for host Jonah Hill in 2018. The “Superbad” favorite hosted the Nov. 3, 2018 episode during Season 44 with musical guest Maggie Rogers.
“Even at that time it was late coming into the show, so there wasn’t a lot of prep time and I wasn’t fully happy with the wigs. Then I think we tried it again, and again I wasn’t happy with it,” Mancuso said. “So we fully gave up on it, this is not going to happen.”
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The sketch finally made it to air in April 2024. Heidi Gardner played a NewsNation anchor hosting a discussion on AI, but the event is disrupted by two audience members who look exactly like Beavis and Butt-Head, played by Gosling and Day under makeup and prosthetics.
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Gardner completely lost it midway through the sketch when she turned to see Day as Butt-Head sitting behind her. She broke character and couldn’t get herself composed for nearly a minute, leading to huge audience cheers.
“People love when the [cast] breaks because it’s funny, right?” Mancuso told The Ankler. “But when you have a moment like Heidi did, I mean, come on. It was funny and it made everybody else enjoy that moment even more.”
Mancuso added that Gardner “really didn’t get to fully see” Day’s “full costume” until the live show, noting that in dress rehearsals “Mikey didn’t really have the bald cap on. She saw it, she kind of had an idea, but it wasn’t full.”
“Even at dress rehearsal, I think he was only like 85 percent there,” Zakarian said. “I tweaked the makeup a little bit, I think Jodi moved the wig back a little bit on him. For air, it was dead on.”
In an interview with Vulture after the episode aired, Gardner revealed the Beavis and Butt-Head sketch had been “put up at table reads and rehearsals for about five years prior to this.” She had also “coached myself for so many years to not break,” but something about seeing Gosling and Day in character made it impossible.
“I left the stage 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,’” Garnder said about breaking for such an extended period of time. “So many other writers and cast members came up and said, ‘Good job.’ I’m like, ‘What? I actually didn’t do my job.’”
Kenan Thompson also appeared in the sketch, but he did not break character once. He later told Variety that he got lucky during the live taping because he “cracked so hard at dress rehearsal.”
“I haven’t had a break like that in a while where I was in tears and I couldn’t talk,” Thompson said. “It was that funny to me and what I was about to say next was funny to me. And I was frozen. I was literally quivering and then I started to panic. Because I was like, I can’t talk without cry-talking. I don’t want to waste the line! It could throw off everything. It was like, three seconds of just chaos.”
Relive the Beavis and Butt-Head sketch below.
