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Heidi Gardner admits she left the Saturday Night Live stage in “a little bit in shock” after breaking character during the viral “Beavis and Butt-Head” sketch.
During the sketch in Saturday’s episode hosted by Ryan Gosling, Gardner portrayed a NewsNation host who must confront two town-hall attendees distracting everyone because they look like Beavis (Gosling) and Butt-Head (Mikey Day). But when looking at Day’s Butt-Head, Gardner immediately broke into laughter, causing a collective laughter in the audience. Given it’s a rarity for Gardner to break, her reaction quickly circulated online with many joining her in the laughs.
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When reflecting on the sketch to Vulture, the SNL star said that despite the rehearsals being fun, she never got “the sense that this would be a nuclear moment for me.” She explained that during rehearsals they were “still working out the particular blocking” of the sketch, including sorting out how and where to look, so there wasn’t room for it to be funny just yet.
“There was a lot of working out the blocking that took away from how funny the sketch was actually going to be. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is way more technical than I thought.’ Ryan was already giggling at this point, but yeah, I didn’t get a total sense of what it was going to be,” she said.
Though it was speculated that Gardner never saw Gosling and Day’s looks for the sketch ahead of filming, she explains she did see the costumes but not the prosthetics.
“It was funny to look back and see Ryan [Gosling] and know he was nodding along to what I was talking about. I could hear people giggle. But yes, the dress rehearsal was when the prosthetics made their debut — the noses and the mouths. I didn’t know about Mikey’s exposed gums and teeth,” she said.
She added, “This makes me feel almost even worse and unprofessional. When I looked and saw Mikey in the dress rehearsal, I lost it. I was shocked. I’m thinking about it right now and laughing.”
Gardner said she kept reminding herself that she couldn’t laugh and needed to carry on with the sketch, but she couldn’t have fully prepared for their finished looks. “I recovered and tried to tell myself in between dress and the live show, ‘You can’t laugh like that again,'” she said. “I was trying to imagine seeing him in my head so I was prepared for it, but I just couldn’t prepare for what I saw. I really tried. I even saw Mikey out of the corner of my eye seconds before I went live. I saw the red shorts. I knew I couldn’t look over there again. Mikey even told me later that he was bending down and hiding himself so I wouldn’t see him.”
Breaking character is a rarity for the actress, with Gardner explaining, “I had coached myself for so many years to not break.” She also described herself as a “perpetual people-pleaser rule follower” but said “it was nice that I broke the rules — unintentionally, of course. I can’t help what I saw, but people were OK with it. Not only OK with it but encouraged it. That’s all the feedback I’ve gotten since.
“I left the stage a little bit in shock. Then the anxiety set in and I was like, ‘Oh my God, was that OK?’ I had some friends in my dressing room, and they were like, ‘Of course, it was OK.’ So many other writers and castmembers came up and said, ‘Good job.’ I’m like, What? I actually didn’t do my job.”
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