For Saturday Night Live‘s pre-Super Bowl episode, the show recruited the Houston Texans’ defensive end JJ Watt to take on first-time hosting duties, and the football star seemed to relish playing on a very different kind of game field at Studio 8H. Of course, as he admitted in his opening monologue, Watt would’ve loved to be a part of the lineup for Super Bowl LIV. “If I was in the Super Bowl, I probably couldn’t be here hosting tonight,” Watt said. “And would I really trade hosting SNL for the Super Bowl?. Yes, I definitely would — definitely would.” However, since that wasn’t an option, he picked up the ball and made the best of it.
One of the most memorable skits of the night came with “Robbie,” SNL‘s parody of Rudy which featured Watt as Riley, the one guy on his football team who didn’t want to give the title bench-warmer a chance to take the field. When asked whether he wanted to echo his teammates in bringing Chris Redd’s Robbie onto the field, he vehemently declined. “F— no. He f—ing sucks at football! You guys want Robbie to play in a playoff game? That is batsh- crazy. We’re gonna lose,” he insisted. “Have you guys seen him at practice? He’s garbage!”
After catching some flak from his teammates and Robbie himself, Robbie was then challenged to make one play against Riley without dirtying his drawers, and let’s just say it became a very stinky situation in that locker room before it was all said and done.
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Another highlight of the evening happened when Watt starred as himself recording his own dialogue for Madden 21. As he read through prepared lines like, “Captain Clumsy strikes again,” and “God, I suck today!” Watt began to notice that the video game version of his character was clearly being groomed to lose. There was one silver lining in store for him during the recording session, though.
Watt also starred in a skit promoting a manly Olay eye product, a cringe-worthy sex talk segment with Kyle Mooney as his son, a Frozen II deleted scene featuring him as Olaf the sensitive oaf, a Bachelor riff called “Pilot Hunk,” a debutante ball-styled skit with him as Bigfoot, and a pizza man who got in trouble for letting customers pay for their pies through, um, other means.
Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays at 11:30/10:30c on NBC.
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