By Emmanuel King
Inde Navarrette walked onto the Saturday Night Live stage on Halloween night as the breakout of a horror film and walked off it as something bigger. The 25-year-old star of Curry Barker's supernatural hit Obsession made her hosting debut on October 31, in the show's first new episode after a two-week hiatus, and she spent the night doing the one thing casting directors always say they are looking for: committing, completely, to everything she was handed.
The monologue set the terms. Navarrette opened by assuring the audience she is nothing like Nikki, her character in Obsession, while slipping into the character's most quoted speech pattern: "You probably know me from the movie Obsession. And a lot of people ask me if I'm anything like my character Nikki and I'm like, 'No... no, no, don't do that.'" She introduced her boyfriend, musician Nick Aiello, as her support system in the audience; the camera found him gagged and strapped to his chair with duct tape, flashing two thumbs up.
Then came the line everyone is still talking about. Navarrette joked that she was shocked to land the role of Rogue in Marvel's upcoming X-Men movie and now has to get into superhero shape. Marvel has announced no such casting, and the moment played as a tease, but it built to the sharpest punchline of the night: "It's really important to get fit, so I've been working out a lot. Every morning, I put on my little whore outfit, and I hit the gym." The Studio 8H audience howled, because everyone in the room knew the reference. Three weeks earlier, on the same stage, host Shane Gillis had drawn a backlash for joking that women at the gym dress like "whores," a bit criticized publicly by Dan Levy and by former cast members Ego Nwodim and Cecily Strong, and mocked again on Weekend Update a week later. Navarrette did not lecture anyone. She took the wording, put it on herself, smiled, and let the laugh do the work. It was a callback with a point of view, delivered by an actor in her first monologue.
The rest of the monologue brought the cast out in costume: Marcello Hernandez as a singing, self-described sexy TSA agent, Jeremy Culhane dressed as Wolverine in the open hope it might count as an audition, Kam Patterson as Elizabeth Holmes, and Grace Reiter as a wooden bird whose group costume partner turned out to be a very casual Kelly Clarkson impersonation. The cold open had already delivered the night's biggest return, with Tom Hanks back as David S. Pumpkins, flanked by Mikey Day and Bobby Moynihan as his skeleton dancers, before James Austin Johnson's Donald Trump hijacked the haunted ride. Gracie Abrams was the musical guest, in her second appearance on the show. Episodes almost never air live on Halloween itself; this was only the fifth time in 52 seasons.
What will travel furthest from the night is a filmed short, The Inventor's Wife, in which Navarrette plays a widow who discovers that her late husband's final gift, a small robot named PD 44, has a purpose neither of them expected. Variety called the short "a fine showcase for Navarrette's crack timing and commitment to the bit, and one of the better SNL digital shorts in quite some time." She stayed busy around it: a ghost cruise sketch in which she played a 1930s kid spirit with total enthusiasm opposite Hernandez and Sarah Sherman, a telenovela that kept collapsing into soda product placement she had to sell at full melodrama, a fake airline pretape built around the viral "she is not real" plane passenger, and a Paw Patrol: Special Victims Unit turn as a no-nonsense Ryder. Recaps were divided on the episode as a whole, with some calling it the strongest show of the season so far and others finding the writing uneven, but the notices for the host herself were consistent: she was game for everything, physical, quick, and unafraid to look ridiculous.
That is exactly why an SNL hosting debut matters for an actor at her stage. A horror breakout proves an actor can carry a tone. A night like this proves range in public, on live television, in front of the entire industry at once: accents, pratfalls, a eulogy played straight inside a comedy short, and a monologue that turned someone else's controversy into her own applause line. Whatever Marvel does or does not do with the Rogue tease, Navarrette leaves Halloween with a viral clip that shows dramatic control, a monologue that shows nerve, and a reputation, now documented, as the kind of performer who says yes to the bit and then outworks it. Breakouts get an actor noticed. Nights like this get an actor hired for the next decade.