Aubrey Plaza Recalls Failed SNL Audition Ahead of Hosting the Series

Ahead of her hosting duties for Saturday Night Live this weekend, The White Lotus and Emily the Criminal star Aubrey Plaza has revealed she actually auditioned for the show, and was rejected. Speaking on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the Parks and Recreation star and the host immediately began talking about her upcoming hosting duties and her extended history with the show. Even before attempting an audition Plaza worked as an intern on the series, adding “They loved me because I did not care about set design at all. And they wanted an intern that had no interest in learning what they did.” Turns out her audition kind of went the same way.

“I didn’t make it to the big, Lorne [Michaels] audition, the famous final audition, but I did a preliminary first-round showcase at UCB,” Plaza revealed. “I did some characters. I remember one character I did was kind of like a Puerto Rican news reporter that was always trying to make all of the news stories like sexy, even if they were horrific news stories. I was just trying to like sex up the news or something.”  

Her second audition character was a little more…bizarre. Plaza adds, “And then the other one was, I was a pill-popping housewife that had my own talk show, called ‘Celebri-tails,’ where I would just name celebrities and name what kind of tail they would have if they were –if they had a tail. Like, I would say, like, ‘Lindsay Lohan would have a bushy squirrel’s tail.’ Or, like, ‘Bill Clinton would have, like, a polar bear’s nub.’ Or ‘Oprah Winfrey would have a dragon’s (tail)’.’I mean, I didn’t get on the show.

Plaza is set to host this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, featuring Sam Smith as musical guest. This week’s episode marks the first of 2023, and the first episode of the show since former cast member Cecily Strong, who confirmed ahead of the mid-season finale that she would be exiting the show. 

Strong previously missed the first few episodes of the current season while performing in her one woman show. Fans were unsure before if she had left the show without mentioning it when she was absent from the opening credits of those episodes, but she eventually returned. Her sudden exit now has thrown many for a loop however.