One was a “pill-popping housewife” with a talk show called Celebri-Tails, “where I would just name celebrities and name what kind of tail they would have.”
Saturday Night Live – Season 42
The actress, who is gearing up to make her Saturday Night Livehosting debut this weekend, revealed that she actually auditioned to join the cast of the legendary sketch comedy show once before, but unfortunately did not make the final cut.
“I didn’t make it to the Lorne [Michaels] audition, the famous final audition, but I did a preliminary first-round showcase,” Plaza explained while visiting The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday. During her audition, Plaza said that she performed two distinctive characters that we can only hope might make an appearance later this week.
“I remember one character I did was like a Puerto Rican news reporter that was always trying to make all of the news stories sexy, even if they were horrific news stories,” she recalled. “I was just trying to like, sex up the news or something.”
The second, however, was a bit more… wild. “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 had a tail,” Plaza explained. “Like I would say, ‘Lindsay Lohan would have a bushy squirrel’s tail.’ Or, like, ‘Bill Clinton would have a polar bear’s nub.'”
While her audition wasn’t meant to be, Plaza did end up working at Saturday Night Live from 2004 to 2005 — just in a slightly different department.
THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON — Episode 1778 — Pictured: Actress Aubrey Plaza during an interview on Monday, January 16, 2023
Aubrey Plaza once auditioned for ‘Saturday Night Live.’
| Credit: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images
“I was an intern in the design department for the four set designers,” she told host and fellow SNL alum Jimmy Fallon. “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.”
According to Plaza, she spent the majority of her time as an intern “stalking” and “lurking in the shadows” instead of talking to the rest of the cast. “I was just, like, creepy. Like, I was a creepy stalker,” she joked. “Now I’m gonna host it, so my master plan worked!”
Watch Plaza discuss her audition in the clip above.
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Saturday Night Live – Season 42
Saturday Night Live
The original late-night comedy sketch show from the one and only Lorne Michaels.
