Ryan Gosling earned the first Emmy nomination of his career for that episode of Saturday Night Live with the legendary Beavis and Butthead sketch and the Barbenheimer “All Too Well” duet with Emily Blunt.
Gosling’s nomination came in the Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series category. He’ll be up against Jon Bernthal (The Bear), Matthew Broderick (Only Murders in the Building), Christopher Lloyd (Hacks), Bob Odenkirk (The Bear), and Will Poulter (The Bear).
Gosling’s April 13 episode of SNL was one of the most memorable of the sketch show’s 49th season. Gosling was mainly there to promote The Fall Guy, but the episode also offered up a chance to tie a neat post-Oscars bow on the Year of Barbenheimer. During his monologue, Gosling joked about saying goodbye to his Barbie character Ken, describing it like a break-up and channeling his emotions into a parody of the ultimate break-up song, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.”
Then Blunt — Gosling’s Fall Guy co-star and a star of Oppenheimer as well — interrupted the performance and scolded Gosling for not promoting their new movie instead. But Blunt, as it turned out, was no more impervious to one last bout of nostalgia, and the two returned to the song and finished it as a duet.
Swift herself gave her enthusiastic approval for the spoof, tweeting, “All Too Well (Ryan and Emily’s Version) !!! Watch me accidentally catch myself singing this version on tour. This monologue is EVERYTHING.”
But arguably, that wasn’t even the most memorable sketch of the night. Later in the show, Gosling and SNL star Mikey Day teamed up for a brilliantly goofy bit where they attended a boring talk show on artificial intelligence dressed exactly like Beavis and Butt-Head. Gosling and Day looked so insane in their costumes that Heidi Gardner — who was playing the moderator — started cracking up, causing others to break as well.
The sketch was such a hit that Gosling enlisted Day for a quick reprisal a few weeks later: At the premiere of The Fall Guy, the pair showed up together in costume and walked the red carpet.
The episode featured a few additional stand-out moments, including a reunion with Kate McKinnon in the alien abductee support group sketch (a call-back to a skit from the first time Gosling hosted in 2015). And a sequel to his famous “Papyrus” video — originally from a 2017 episode — about a man driven crazy by the font choice for the billion-dollar box office flick Avatar.
