One of Saturday Night Live’s most delightfully bizarre sketches in recent memory—host Ryan Gosling dressing up as Beavis opposite Mikey Day's real-life version of Butt-Head—almost made it to air years earlier. But according to the veteran cast member, the popular bit faced a long road to the Studio 8H stage, with a failed first attempt involving a different star entirely: Jonah Hill.
In a recent interview with Variety, Mikey Day opened up about the now-viral sketch and its unexpected journey to air. A longtime SNL writer and cast member, Day is best known for helping create fan-favorite oddities, such as David S. Pumpkins and the recurring “Miss Rafferty” alien abduction sketches with Kate McKinnon. However, the concept, centered around the culturally controversial cartoon characters, he revealed, had been quietly circulating in the writers' room for years. He explained:
We tried it once with Jonah Hill… But the sketch itself wasn’t there yet.
The host of Is it Cake? (streaming with a Netflix subscription) and his writing partner, Streeter Seidell, continued to tinker with the concept, attempting another version during Oscar Isaac’s hosting week. Unfortunately, that iteration never even reached dress rehearsal. Day continued:
The set requirements were just too big that week… There were a lot of heavy-set sketches already in play.
As a result, the sketch was shelved temporarily. Day admitted to the outlet that they were about to completely give up on the idea altogether, that is, until Ryan Gosling returned to host, and everything changed. According to the longtime cast member, Gosling “changes our lives every time he hosts,” and the revived version aired to immediate praise and widespread fan love, with both Gosling and the writer-performer fully committed to their prosthetic-heavy transformations and vacant stares. The sketch was bolstered by Heidi Gardner’s barely-contained laughter, which only added to the charm.
It’s not the first time a weird Mikey Day sketch has gone viral after years of quiet development. In fact, that’s become something of a specialty for Day and Seidell, whose writing partnership has produced everything from the aforementioned Tom Hanks’ legendary David S. Pumpkins to a laundry list of breakout bits that help newer cast members shine.
The SNL standout, who joined the show in 2013 as a writer before being promoted to featured cast, says part of the magic of working on the show is its unpredictability. He explained:
You can literally write whatever your brain can come up with…It’s very engineered to my ADD kind of brain.
The sketch comedy mainstay doesn’t spend too much time dissecting where his sketch ideas come from, whether they’re sparked by an old commercial, a Disney ride, or a nostalgic cartoon from MTV’s heyday. “When it works, it just kind of works,” he shrugged. And honestly, it’s hard to argue with that logic. On paper, the Beavis and Butt-Head sketch sounds like a long shot, but when it finally hit the screen, it exceeded all expectations. Thankfully, the team didn’t shelve the idea before they found the perfect Beavis in Ryan Gosling.
SNL recently wrapped its landmark 50th season, and fans can stream it, along with all previous seasons, including Season 49, which featured Mikey Day’s Beavis and Butt-Head sketch, exclusively with a Peacock subscription.
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