A long-awaited Saturday Night Live sketch came to life this weekend, but it was not without its challenges.
The Beavis and Butt-Head skit saw Heidi Gardner play a news anchor grilling a professor (Kenan Thompson) on the dangers of artificial intelligence before two audience members, Jeff (Mikey Day) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) distracted the course of the interview due to their striking resemblance to to the ’90s cartoon characters.
In the skit, Thompson requests that both Jeff and Dean move from where they are seated in the audience as their looks are distracting him, and when Gardner, 40, turned around to address Jeff, she broke character at the ridiculousness of his costume.
“I just couldn’t prepare for what I saw,” she told Vulture of the skit. “I really tried. I even saw Mikey out of the corner of my eye seconds before I went live. I saw the red shorts. I knew I couldn’t look over there again. Mikey even told me later that he was bending down and hiding himself so I wouldn’t see him.”
Despite the fact that she’d run through the skit in the dress rehearsal — and had “lost it” during that take, too — Gardner could not manage through the script without laughing.
“I’m thinking about it right now and laughing. I recovered and tried to tell myself in between dress and the live show, ‘You can’t laugh like that again.’ I was trying to imagine seeing him in my head so I was prepared for it,” she recalled.
