Saturday Night Live: Jason Sudeikis Reprises as Joe Biden in Cold Open

Jason Sudeikis returned to Saturday Night Live last night, this time in the role of host, but he brought his impression of President Joe Biden with him. Saturday Night Live has gone through a few different performers as Biden in the past few years, from Jim Carrey to Woody Harrelson. However, Sudeikis had the longest tenure, playing the character on Saturday Night Live while Biden was vice president. James Austin Johnson is the current Biden, and, in this opening Saturday Night Live sketch, he gets a visit from a “ghost of Biden past” in the form of Sudeikis’ Vice President Biden. Alex Moffat also shows up for a minute to acknowledge his brief tenure playing Biden. You can watch the sketch below.

Jim Carrey’s six-week stint playing Biden helped define Saturday Night Live‘s run-up to last year’s presidential election. Carrey bowed out of the role after Biden’s electoral victory.

“Though my term was only meant to be 6 weeks, I was thrilled to be elected as your SNL President…comedy’s highest call of duty,” Carrey said in a statement announcing his departure. “I would love to go forward knowing that Biden was the victor because I nailed that sh*t. But I am just one in a long line of proud, fighting SNL Bidens!”

As for Sudeikis, his star has risen since he left Saturday Night Live in 2013 (though he’s made occasional appearances since then, including to reprise his role as Biden). He’s the star of Apple TV+’s hit comedy series Ted Lasso. Series co-creator Brendan Hunt told Comicbook.com that the series could go on longer than planned. “We’ve always seen it as a three-season situation. We still have a three-season story arc in mind, but the thing we weren’t prepared for when we were thinking three seasons, was the degree to which people would take to the show,” Hunt said. “So, perhaps that intention will be challenged a little bit, but that’s where our head is at right now.”

“It goes without saying, we certainly wished we hadn’t debuted in a pandemic, we wish there was no pandemic to debut during, but if we were some help in that difficult time, that’s great, because that’s, obviously, not what we were setting out to do. Pretty quickly after the show debuted, and, I think, maybe specifically, because there were three episodes that came out all at once in the beginning, the Twitter reaction was different.”

What do you think of Sudeikis’ return to Saturday Night Live as Joe Biden? Let us know in the comments.