Saturday Night Live Pitches A24's Shrek 5, Starring Bad Bunny As Shrek
Beloved indie studio A24 reportedly wants to expand into big IP projects and more commercially viable films. DreamWorks Animation is in development on "Shrek 5." Is this a match made in heaven? Possibly, according to this week's "Saturday Night Live" host, Bad Bunny. He doesn't really care either way. Though he has written an entire script for "Shrek: Infinity."
Mr. Bunny is becoming quite the multi-hyphenate, branching out from his existing careers as a musical artist and professional wrestler into the world of acting as well. Most recently, he appeared in the biopic "Cassandro," which stars Gael García Bernal as the titular exótico wrestler, and Bad Bunny as a friend who politely declines Cassandro's offers to be more than friends (a pretty challenging role; Bernal is a charmer).
Weekly writing sessions on "SNL" are notoriously exhausting, with the team writing scripts all day and all night on Tuesday in order to be ready for a table read on Wednesday. The host of the show typically wields a lot of power in choosing which sketches they'd like to do and which ones are, to quote John Mulaney quoting Mick Jagger, "Not funnyyy!!" So, comedy trio Please Don't Destroy are understandably a bit exasperated when Bad Bunny wanders into a creative session dressed as Shrek, but wavers back and forth on whether or not he wants to do something Shrek-related. Check out the sketch above.
Saturday Night Live hosts can be a blessing ... or a curse
Though Bad Bunny's Shrek sketch might seem ridiculous, there's a kernel of truth in there. As Mulaney put it in his aforementioned stand-up bit, "Famous people are weird as s**t." As if trying to come up with topical, funny sketches every week wasn't tough enough, the "Saturday Night Live" writing team also have to contend with the egos and eccentricities of whichever celebrity is fronting the show that week.
30 Rockefeller Plaza has welcomed a true rogues gallery of "SNL" hosts over the years. Previous guests include Paris Hilton (who, according to Tina Fey, wanted to play Jessica Simpson in a skit "because I hate her" and "she's fat"), Steven Seagal ("the biggest jerk who's ever been on the show," per Lorne Michaels), and Donald Trump ("looking back ... there's nothing good I can take from that week," Taran Killam later told NPR).
Has an "SNL" host ever really wandered into a Tuesday night writing session dressed as Shrek but acting oddly indifferent about doing a Shrek-based sketch? Probably not. Have there been hosts who have done weirder things than that? Almost certainly.
"Saturday Night Live" season 49 returns next week with host Nate Bargatze and musical guest Foo Fighters.