‘Saturday Night Live’ Takes on College Admissions Scandal and Julian Assange (Watch)
Michael Keaton appeared in the April 13 “Saturday Night Live” cold open sketch as Julian Assange to counter Kate McKinnon’s Lori Loughlin and Pete Davidson’s Michael Avenatti for who committed the “craziest” crime.
In a take on MSNBC’s “Lockup,” a couple of inmates (played by Chris Redd, Kenan Thompson and Kyle Mooney) were comparing notes about whose crimes were the most serious, when McKinnon as Loughlin strolled by, telling the guys she paid $500,000 to get her daughter into USC and getting a women’s crew coach to say she was good at rowing.
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“I’m loco,” she said. “That’s not including the $300,000 I blew on tuition.”
When she then pointed out that her daughter majored in communications and was working as an Instagram influencer, Thompson had enough and called for the guards to take her away.
“Hey, I own the guards in here. I helped their kids get into a really competitive pre-K,” she said.
She then put on a kufi and said she bought her way into Islam for $100,000 “plus another 100 for them to stop calling me ‘the white devil.'”
Although Thompson didn’t think she’d last a week in prison, she wasn’t worried. “You think prison is hard? I’ve done 68 Hallmark movies,” she said. “I’ve seen hell, man. And in half those Hallmark movies I married Santa’s son, so I’ve lost all sense of reality.”
After McKinnon’s Loughlin, it was Davidson’s Avenatti’s turn, posturing his own success and crimes by saying he was accused of things “you can’t even conceive of, like blackmailing a sneaker company and stealing taxes from a coffee shop to fund a race car team. And I’m so shady that a porn star once said she had to distance herself from me.”
Davidson also offered the only political comment of the sketch, noting he might still run for president: “Avenatti/Baldwin, 2020,” he said.
Keaton as Assange was a surprise third entry, first confused for “Santa [who’s] back on crack,” per Thompson.
“That’s right it’s me. I’m the architect of anarchy; I’m the king of chaos; I’m the scourge of the cleaning staff at the Ecuadorian Embassy,” he said.
When Mooney said he didn’t think he looked so tough, Keaton as Assange rebutted with, “I hope you’re proud of every single photo in your iCloud because boom, all your ding-dong pics just went on the internet.”
But how crazy was he, really? In his own words, he is a “James Bond supervillain” who is “one step away from destroying the g– damn moon.”
And in the end they decided it was Keaton’s Assange who won, even over Melissa Villasenor’s Tekashi 6ix9ine, who popped up at the end with “just robbery and gun stuff.”
Watch the April 13 cold open below:
“Saturday Night Live” airs live coast-to-coast at 11:30 p.m. ET / 8:30 p.m. PT on NBC.
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