Ashley Padilla’s gradual star turn on Saturday Night Live has been thrilling to watch. Since she joined the show as a featured player in 2024, on the cusp of its big 50th anniversary season, Padilla has reliably transformed innocuous-seeming characters—notably, moms—into character studies that pluck at eccentricities lurking just below the surface. In last night’s episode, Padilla’s performance as a mother admitting a change of heart in her political views marked one of her strongest roles to date.
In a sketch entitled “Mom Confession,” Padilla and her husband (played by this week’s delightfully zany host, Alexander Skarsgård) were about to head to dinner with their four children, who were visiting from afar. As they all got up to leave, Padilla told her children that she first needed to share a “shocking” development with them—but wouldn’t reveal what it was unless they promised not to react. She anxiously did a couple of practice rounds to ensure they wouldn’t, announcing that she ate bugs and that her butt had fallen off: “Can’t find it,” she said sternly. She then revealed her confession in between staccato breaths: “What I have to tell you … is I may have changed my mind … about Trump.”
“Mom Confession” was one of several sketches in the episode that nodded to the latest developments in national news. Although the performance didn’t explicitly mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal tactics in Minneapolis, the show was more frank elsewhere: The cold open featured former cast member Pete Davidson impersonating “border czar” Tom Homan in his attempt to take the temperature down in the city. ICE came up again in “Weekend Update,” and in the Marcello Hernández–led “Immigrant Dad Talk Show” sketch, which Hernández kicked off by addressing “all the white people that are sad about the immigrants getting deported.” But “Mom Confession” imagined how the news cycle might be playing out more intimately in some American homes, where political polarization within families has become a more salient topic since Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.
After Padilla revealed her shifting opinion on the president, her four kids couldn’t stop themselves from animatedly interjecting. Padilla swiftly unraveled, screaming back, “Stop! Do you want this to be real or not?” As the kids bit their tongues, she continued, vaguely alluding to how recent events had made her reconsider her support: “I feel now … like he might be … bad for our country.” When her exasperated children noted that they’d been saying as much for years, Padilla instantly registered their rebuttal as self-righteousness: “I’m sorry I’m late to the perfect party!”
[Read: The art of navigating a family political discussion, peacefully]
Padilla’s mannerisms—and a tightly written script that brought into sharp focus a familiar argument that’s clearly played out in the family before—made this sketch an outstanding bit in last night’s solid episode, the 1,000th installment of the show. Here, the actor’s physical comedy chops brought to life the role of a Trump-supporting mother leery about revealing her evolving views to her seemingly left-leaning children. Padilla nailed her delivery between gulping breaths and clutching her stomach, as though doing so was helping her stand up straight. When her children cut in again, the walls went back up. “Bye! I take it back,” she snapped, falling back into a chair, sulking, and twisting her body away from them. Whenever she felt the slightest inkling of criticism burbling up, Padilla lashed out with a smattering of stereotypes about liberal America: “You think you know everything with your matcha, your rapping Hamilton, your IUDs!”
The sketch exposed why politics can be such tense territory for family members: Few people are willing to admit to a change of heart out of fear of judgment. For those who’ve sat through political arguments with family members of opposing beliefs, it might be hard to imagine outspoken voters being vulnerable with one another in this way. But seeing Padilla pout her way through her confession, while pleading for grace, was its own sort of fantasy. Skarsgård’s aloof dad supported her through the whole thing, and by the end, her kids apologized for making it so hard for her to talk to them about the topic. In a way, the sketch considered a scenario where families could at least begin talking about politics, rather than stomping away.
The post SNL Satirizes a Politically Divided Family Trying to Talk appeared first on The Atlantic.
