It took a minute, but Ego Nwodim broke out on Saturday Night Live with her Lisa from Temecula bit opposite host Pedro Pascal. The sketch could easily have been cut from the show since it died at dress rehearsal, she told David Spade and Dana Carvey on this week’s Fly on the Wall podcast. But not only did Pascal fight for the sketch’s inclusion in his show, he also demanded changes that made it much funnier.
The sketch killed all week during rehearsals, but two dumb changes were made for the dress rehearsal — especially considering that Lisa’s frantic steak-cutting was the crux of the comedy. First, the prop steak that Nwodim had to cut through was replaced with a T-bone version. “I can’t even pantomime sawing a T-bone steak,” she complained. “I was like, ‘Whose idea was it to put a big bone in the middle?’”
Even worse: Someone told the prop department that the restaurant table was shaking too much and the commotion needed to be dialed back. “Sabotage,” hissed Spade. “That’s the one thing that could hurt that sketch.”
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“There’s no sketch,” agreed Nwodim. “It’s just a woman who has ordered an extra well-done steak. There’s no comedy.”
Pascal to the rescue. “Mind you, he’s the straight man in that sketch so the jokes aren’t really his. It’s not really about him. And a lot of hosts would’ve used that opportunity to get out of it,” explained Nwodim. Instead, he went into the meeting between dress rehearsal and the actual show and “fought for it. He was like, they gave her a T-bone steak! The table didn’t shake! I love (the sketch). I want it.”
Pascal’s show had one of the highest hit rates in recent memory, with Lisa, a Mario Kart/The Last of Us mash-up and an overprotective mother sketch with Marcello Hernandez. What made him such an effective host? Nwodim said there are at least two reasons.
First, Pascal, “whose praises I’ll sing till I’m blue in the face,” is more than happy to look stupid. He’s a “great actor, down to play, down to look like a fool, down to look like a dumb ass.” Case in point:
Reason #2: He “didn’t try to curate his own show.” Carvey immediately understood what Nwodim was saying: “He just gave himself up to everybody.”
Nwodim revealed that some hosts take a different approach during the show’s late-night meeting on Friday. “Hosts, not always, sometimes try to manipulate the system. If they’re not scoring, that’s their opportunity to say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing in that one.’ Or ‘I can’t wrap my head around this very straightforward character.’ They start to plant those seeds. That’s how you begin to kill a sketch.”
There’s no hard feelings if a host doesn’t think an initial script is funny, said Nwodim. “Please just be honest with me because I’ll write something else that we can both be excited about,” she explained. “But what I adore about Pedro is he did take that opportunity in that Saturday meeting” to stick up for one of Season 48’s funniest bits.