Lupita Nyong’o - Cosmic Girl
From Mexico City to Nairobi; from 12 Years A Slave to the Star Wars saga.
It was a great year for Saturday Night Live, 2017. Okay, so the show’s preferred presidential candidate might have come up short but the dogfight between Hilary Rodham Clinton and Donald John Trump provided the basis for any number of extraordinary sketches. But while the estimable Alec Baldwin and the sterling Kate McKinnon made political hay, SNL produced Lorne Michaels and his writing team threw together a mass of memorable sketches that had nothing to do with the race for the White House.
The pick of these was ‘Actress Round Table’ which saw Hollywood’s finest and fairest address the position of women in the movie industry. Featuring show regular Cecily Strong as Marion Cotillard and special guest Margot Robbie as a corpsing Keira Knightley (“Everyone wants to cast you as the girlfriend, the mother, the beautiful girlfriend, the beautiful mother”), the skit’s effortlessly stolen by SNL MVP McKinnon whose grand dame Debette Goldry harkens back to the gold age of the Hollywood, a time when women slept with producers to land parts (“It was a fair trade”), actresses were frequently paid in brooches and starlets unfortunate enough to fall pregnant found themselves locked in loveless marriages with gay chimpanzees (“We were the best of friends”).
“But what has all this got to do with Lupita Nyong’o?” you bellow with some justification. Well, as well as Cotillard, Knightley and Goldry (“Women writers?!
You’d have to teach them how to read first”), ‘Actress Round Table’ also showcased Saturday Night Live cast member Sasheer Zamata as the Academy Award-winning star of 12 Years A Slave. Alright, so Goldry constantly refers to her as ‘Little Peter No No’, but if you’re looking for proof of how far Nyong’o has come in next to no time, her ‘presence’ in a sketch like this is pretty damn definitive.
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