Timothée Chalamet returned to Saturday Night Live last night for the show’s first episode since the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike, meaning hosts no longer have to dance around who they are and why they’re there so they don’t look like scabs, and Chalamet celebrated the opportunity to get back to normal in a heavily promotional monologue that featured the Wonka star singing a new version of “Pure Imagination” about “shameless self-promotion” that shouted out, yes, Wonka, but also Dune, Killers Of The Flower Moon (which he’s not even in), and the Chanel ad that he filmed with Martin Scorsese. It was a cute gag, but, ironically, he and some of the cast followed it up with a less-cute rap about baby-faced boys that seemed like something the writers had come up with before the strike and didn’t want to throw away:
Chalamet’s breakout sketch of the night was one where Sarah Squirm played a woman suffering from a reoccurring dream about some mysterious figure, with Bowen Yang playing a doctor who can create a visualization of the man. It turns out to be Chalamet as Troye Sivan, introducing himself as an “Australian YouTube twink turned indie pop star and model turned HBO actor Troye Sivan being played by an American actor who can’t do an Australian accent” (with the crowd whooping and hollering throughout), and he proceeded to do Sivan’s various viral dances and pull down his pants to shake his butt. Then the members of musical guest Boygenius showed up as other Troye Sivans and everybody danced.
The real Sivan reacted to the sketch early this morning on TikTok, saying it was “a weird fucking dream,” saying, “Like, imagine: Timothée Chalamet was in my dream, but he was me, and he was wearing my clothes…” Sivan has since changed his Instagram profile picture to Chalamet as him, and fans both of guys seem to be getting a kick out of the whole thing.
Meanwhile, a pre-taped sketch with comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy is getting a different kind of a big reaction. In the sketch, Chalamet plays a man threatening to jump off a building, with the Please Don’t Destroy members trying to convince him not to. He explains that he’s a musician and plays his bad songs for them, which they agree to share on social media, until Chalamet’s character says that his band is called “Hay-mas,” spelled like “Hamas.”
One need only to glance at the comments of social media pop culture news aggregators to see the kind of predictable reaction this has received, with some questioning whether or not it was tasteless or offensive, others arguing that neither Palestine or Israel were the butt of the joke, and plenty of people pointing out just how many layers this joke had to go through before making it to air (regardless of how they feel about it).