Saturday Night Live: Ego Nwodim Reprises Lisa From Temecula

Saturday Night Live cast member Ego Nwodim has quickly returned to one of the best new characters for the comedy series this season, Lisa From Temecula. Nwodim first appeared as the disruptive and messy Lisa during the episode hosted by Pedro Pascal, and she brought her table-shaking antics back during tonight’s Ana de Armas episode. A similar set-up happened in tonight’s episode, a group of friends are at a table together (this time a wedding) only for Lisa to misinterpret almost all of her interactions and make a gigantic mess of everything. We can’t sell it as well as Ego does, just watch it yourself below.

“There were high expectations for the sketch,” Nwodim previously told Vanity Fair. “All week people were like, ‘Your sketch is going to be incredible.’ That, for me, is jinxing the sketch. Every time that happens, the sketch goes horribly wrong and the audience doesn’t respond to it. I was like, ‘Please, no. I don’t want that energy on it.’… One of the producers had said to me, ‘We haven’t had a recurring character in so long, and we think this will be a recurring character.’ On Friday, Lorne told us to give the character a more prominent name. He wanted something that people could call back to. We were like, ‘She’s Lisa.’ Then Alex and Gary made her more memorable with Lisa From Temecula.”

Since the first appearance of Lisa From Temecula, Nwodim revealed that the response has been something never expected. In the same interview, an oral history of the character (revealing that she nearly didn’t make the cut for the episode), the comedian added: “I have been on cloud nine. It’s been so incredible to see people’s response to Lisa, to have people say they have a Lisa in their family. My whole mission is to bring joy, so it felt like mission accomplished that week….I had just gotten offstage after the show and I’m changing into my Ego clothes, and Martin Short was there, and he said, ‘I would watch that sketch every single week.’ Are you kidding?”

This week’s new Lisa From Temecula certainly featured a few moments of the cast breaking character and laughing at the mess created by Nwodim, but not to the same extent that The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal and Bowen Yang had in the original sketch. In any event, they’re both funny, and Lisa From Temecula is here to stay on Saturday Night Live.