‘SNL’: Sarah Paulson Crashes Pedro Pascal’s Episode in Hilarious Cameo

Saturday Night Live‘s continued reliance on guest stars for extra pops of applause from the audience extended into this weekend’s episode with guest host Pedro Pascal. Sarah Paulson was this week’s surprise guest, visiting during the “Fancam Assembly” sketch. Although Pascal and Paulson have not worked together in a film or television series, the two are longtime friends.

“Fancame Assembly” starred Pascal as a teacher who was frustrated with his students, who kept making fancams about him. Fancams are video montages of a person or fictional character set to a song with visual effects created as a tribute to their subjects. Pascal’s teacher found the ones created by his students increasingly disturbing.

Later, Bowen Yang’s student revealed that the class adopted Pascal as “daddy” and a teacher named Ms. Jenny as “mommy.” Ms. Jenny was played by Paulson, who insisted there was nothing romantic between the two teachers.The students felt otherwise and created a fancam edit to show the two clearly in love. Pascal and Paulson then agreed to tell the students the truth. “It’s true, he’s daddy, I’m mommy, and we’re all a happy family,” Paulson said. “No crumbs left.”

Pascal now stars in HBO’s The Last of Us and will be seen as Din Djarin in Disney+’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 3. Paulson recently starred in Netflix’s Ratcheted and has starred in multiple seasons of American Crime Story and American Horror Story. She won an Emmy in 2016 for playing Marcia Clark in American Crime Story. Surprisingly, Paulson has never hosted an SNL episode.

Paulson and Pascal have not appeared in the same project, but are close friends. In a 2014 Interview feature between the two of them, Pascal revealed that they met each other in 1993 when they were both aspiring 18-year-old actors in New York City. In 2016, Paulson compared her sudden success at 41 to Pascal’s late stardom after his turn on Game of Thrones.

“I have a very good friend named Pedro Pascal and he had a similar thing with Game of Thrones,” Paulson told Notofu. “He and I talk about how grateful we are that [the success] happened when it did. We are so aware of how rare these kinds of things are, how hard fought they were for both of us, that we don’t take any of it for granted. Nothing about it is commonplace, nothing about it is ordinary, nothing about it is just a typical day when you’re just hanging out on set with Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates.”

Paulson is the latest surprise guest of the season for SNL. The series is going through growing pains after a huge exodus of beloved cast members over the summer, so Lorne Michaels has been leaning hard toward bringing in A-list hosts and guests. Amy Poehler made a surprise appearance in the Jan. 21 episode hosted by Aubrey Plaza, while Natasha Lyonne and Kel Mitchell popped in for Keke Palmer’s Dec. 3 episode. SNL will return with a new episode on Feb. 25, hosted by Woody Harrelson and featuring Jack White as the musical guest. SNL airs at 11:30 p.m. ET Saturdays on NBC and streams on Peacock.