Inde Navarrette put her upcoming Marvel role front and center during her first turn as host of Saturday Night Live, using her opening monologue to tease playing Rogue in X-Men—and to take a shot at Shane Gillis’ monologue from the previous episode.
Discussing the work required to get into “Marvel shape,” Navarrette delivered a callback to Gillis’ sexist opening remarks.
“So, every morning, I put on my little whore outfit and hit the gym,” she joked, drawing laughs from the studio audience.
The actress also addressed her “scream queen” debut as Nikki in Curry Barker’s Obsession. Navarrette insisted that she was “nothing like Nikki,” only for the monologue to reveal her boyfriend taped to his chair in the audience.
The opening brought several other cast members into the action. Marcello Hernandez modeled a sexy TSA-agent costume, while Kam Patterson appeared as Elizabeth Holmes. Jeremy Culhane dressed as Wolverine and pitched himself for the role in the upcoming Jake Schreier project referenced in the bit.
Veronika Slowikowska and Grace Reiter joined the parade as Kelly Clarkson and the mechanical singing bird involved in Clarkson’s online feud with a Brooklyn gift shop.
Ghosts, disastrous inventions and disruptive flyers
Navarrette’s first sketch paired her with Hernandez as the ghosts of two children from the 1930s aboard the Queen Mary. Their characters repeatedly distracted a tourist who was trying to learn where another ghost had hidden treasure.
Air travel provided the setup for another ensemble piece, a fake Delta commercial promoting “Delta Disruptive,” a special section reserved exclusively for unruly and irrational passengers.
Mikey Day played a traveler attempting to open an exit door while declaring, “This plane is made out of Israel.” Navarrette, meanwhile, impersonated the woman who became known on social media for insisting, “She is not real!”
She switched personas again for The Uninterested Woman Dating Show, playing Dane, one of the show’s so-called “fuckboy” contestants. Jane Wickline and Sarah Sherman appeared alongside her as fellow contestants.
One of the night’s darkest premises came in The Inventor. Navarrette played the widow of an inventor who returned home after his funeral to discover the creations he had left behind, including a robot called PD-44.
Six years later, she brought home a date played by Ben Marshall. The robot attacked him, ripping off his penis and blowing him up. Only then did Navarrette’s character understand that PD-44 stood for “Penis Destroyer”—and interpret the machine’s violent programming as proof of her late husband’s devotion.
“He did love me. My husband did love me after all,” she said while covered in blood.
Navarrette and Hernandez reunited for a Spanish soap-opera spoof built around an ill-fated product-placement assignment. Their characters were required to incorporate Sprite Cherry Lime Habanero into a dramatic scene, but the promotional effort quickly became a disaster for the brand.
The melodrama escalated until Hernandez’s character urged Navarrette’s to drink the soda in order to kill her unborn baby, which had been conceived by his brother.
ShowBiz Take
Navarrette’s hosting debut connected three different parts of her current screen profile in one appearance: the unsettling world of Obsession, the physical preparation for her forthcoming Rogue role and the anything-goes demands of live sketch comedy.
The Rogue reference was the night’s biggest forward-looking movie tease, but Navarrette kept it inside a joke rather than turning her monologue into a straightforward promotional stop. From there, the episode gave her sharply different assignments, including a 1930s ghost, a dating-show contestant, a soap star and a blood-covered widow discovering the brutal meaning behind a robot’s name.
The episode also marked another first: Gracie Abrams made her debut as Saturday Night Live’s musical guest on the same installment that introduced Navarrette as host.