‘SNL’ Alum Rachel Dratch Makes Surprise Return During Season Premiere

Saturday Night Live brought back veteran cast member Rachel Dratch for the cold open parody of the Brett Kavanaugh senate hearings on its season 44 premiere.

The comedian and actress played Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar on the sketch, questioning Kavanaugh (Matt Damon) on his drinking habits, under the watchful eye of a cardboard cutout of Alyssa Milano, who attended the hearings in real life.

The sketch was part of a particularly long cold open from the NBC variety sketch series that also featured Kate McKinnon as Lindsey Graham.

“Now, Judge Kavanaugh, would you say in high school that you were a frequent drinker?” she asked an emotional Kavanaugh.

“Look, I like beer. I like beer… boys like beer, girls like beer. I like beer. I like Beer!”

Then she asked Kavanaugh if he ever drank too many beers.

“You mean was I cool? Yeah,” he responded.

“Did you ever drink so much that you blacked out?” she asked further, eliciting the now infamous response from Kavanaugh that made headlines earlier this week.

“I don’t know, did you?” he answered with a question.

Later, she asked, realizing the cardboard cutout as if Milano was behind her.

“She’s so good at finding her lens,” she said.

“[SNL] got Matt Damon AND Rachael Dratch? Yes. Dig into politics despite the flak, we need this,” one user said on Twitter, commending the cold open.

“OMG Rachel Dratch is back as Amy Klobuchar….. This is literally how the [KavanaughHearings] went. Beer x 10 and random crying and a lot of screaming. [SNL],” another user wrote.

The sketch was a satire to the Thursday hearing when both Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Supreme Court Nominee Kavanaugh testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations of sexual assault made by the doctor.

She accused Kavanaugh of attacking her in 1982, when both were in high school. Ford went into detail about the attack during her testimony.

“Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time, because he was very inebriated, and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath my clothing,” Ford said Thursday. “I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”

Ford later said she was “100 percent” sure Kavanaugh assaulted her.

In his testimony, Kavanaugh denied the allegations while holding back tears. The committee decided to take the vote on his nomination to the Sense Friday, pending an FBI investigation into the allegations.

Saturday Night Live airs weekly at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC.