Everyone knows about Aubrey Plaza’s signature dark humor that is so out there that you honestly can’t tell if she is kidding or not. But there is an alternate timeline where Plaza became a Saturday Night Live cast member in the early 2000s, which would have been interesting, to say the least. It’s hard to imagine Plaza standing on the stage and hugging Seth Meyers after another week of absurd impressions, and maybe somewhere out there, that timeline exists.
But Plaza did get her start there, though it was as an intern in the design department. Plaza recently told Jimmy Fallon about her experience on the infamous late-night show. “They loved me because I did not care about set design at all,” the actress told Fallon on The Tonight Show. “They wanted an intern that had no interest in learning what they did because they were moody bastards,” Plaza joked, adding that she was there in 2004 right after Fallon exited the show. “I replaced you, Jimmy.”
When it came to being a cast member, Plaza has less success. The actress admitted that she did audition for the show, but it fell flat. “I didn’t make it to the big, Lorne [Michaels] audition, the famous final audition, but I did a preliminary first-round showcase at UCB,” Plaza revealed.
“I did some characters. I remember one character I did was kind of like a Puerto Rican news reporter that was always trying to make all of the news stories like sexy, even if they were horrific news stories. I was just trying to like sex up the news or something.” Perhaps her character clashed too much with Bill Hader’s frustrated newscaster bit.
Plaza also had another character, in which she would assign different celebrities types of tails. “I was a pill-popping housewife that had my own talk show, called ‘Celebri-tails,’ where I would just name celebrities and name what kind of tail they would have if they were –if they had a tail. Like, I would say, like, ‘ Lindsay Lohan would have a bushy squirrel’s tail.’ Or, like, ‘ Bill Clinton would have, like, a polar bear’s nub.’ Or ‘Oprah Winfrey would have a dragon’s (tail)’” she laughed, adding. “I mean, I didn’t get on the show.”
She didn’t get on the show at the time, but Plaza is set to host this weekend with musical guest Sam Smith. “Now I’m gonna host it. So my master plan worked!” Check out the clip above, and see Plaza host SNL this weekend.