A Nepo Baby Battle Between SNL's Please Don't Destroy And Dakota Johnson Gets Ugly
Even in a hit-or-miss "Saturday Night Live" episode, you can always count on the "Please Don't Destroy" guys to deliver a digital short that is decent at the very least. Such was the case with "Roast," a short where Dakota Johnson walks into the PDD office and inexplicably starts roasting all three of the guys. She has some plausible deniability during the first two or three digs, but the moment she calls them "The Lonelier Island" — a reference to SNL's original digital short comedy trio whom the PDD guys still live in the shadow of — the gloves come off.
"I've always wanted to meet the star of 'Madame Web.' Can you introduce me to Sydney Sweeney?" John asks. Things escalate further until Martin makes a joke about nobody wanting to see her movie "Daddio," and Johnson replies, "Is Daddio who you call to get your job?" It's a dig that hits hard considering that Martin's dad is Tim Herlihy, Adam Sandler's comedy partner and a former "SNL" writer and producer. John's father, meanwhile, is "SNL" producer Steve Higgins. These connections have gotten both of them on display in Vulture's viral 2022 article about "the Hollywood Nepo-Verse."
There are all sorts of comedy sketch groups out there who go viral on social media but don't quickly end up as writers on "SNL," and that's probably because most of those other groups weren't born with such strong industry connections. It's a brutal swing by Dakota Johnson, but as John quickly points out, it's not a wise one. Her father is the award-winning actor and director Don Johnson, after all. Much like a nuclear strike during the Cold War, a nepo dig from a fellow nepo baby is Mutually Assured Destruction.
Nepo Truce?
Dakota is quick to realize this, however, and agrees to a truce on such delicate matters. What's a nepo truce? Apparently it's when nepo babies press their nepo rings together and recite, "A foot in the door, but so much more," while the rings glow mysteriously.
It's absurd, and it's also a funny way of the three acknowledging how lucky they've been. A common defense of celebrity nepo babies, usually from nepo babies themselves, is that being born with connections will "get your foot in the door," but "there's still a lot of work that comes after that." That's Lily-Rose Depp's explanation at least, but as many critics have pointed out, getting your foot in the door as an unconnected person is often insanely difficult, and that's especially true for an industry as exclusive as Hollywood. It's not just one step in a series of equally-difficult steps; it's often the hardest and most time-consuming step in the whole process.
The best thing for these nepo babies to do is simply acknowledge all this and move on, rather than pretend as if they've succeeded purely on merit alone. This latest Please Don't Destroy sketch accomplishes the former, with John, Martin and Dakota all fully accepting the nepotism criticisms, all while kindly acknowledging Ben Marshall as the only one in the room without a well-established father in the industry. Ben seems sad to be left out of his friends' magical truce, but at least he's got the comfort of knowing he'll forever be impervious to this specific brand of attack.