Adam Driver Wishes You a Very Unsettling Holiday Season
When this week’s Saturday Night Live host, Adam Driver, explained in his opening monologue that he had a “very deep and personal relationship with Santa,” it was pretty obvious that whatever was to follow wasn’t going to be your typical holiday cheer.
The Oscar-nominated actor sat down at a piano, demonstrated that he really could play it, and then started barking his wish list to the jolly man in the North Pole. Among his wants for Christmas: “One of those giant metal Tesla trucks” that would “pair perfectly with [his] teeny tiny micropenis.” He also revealed that he would like people to stop coming up to him on the street saying that he killed Han Solo, given his role as Kylo Ren in the latest Star Wars trilogy. “I didn’t kill Han Solo,” he said. “Wokeness killed Han Solo.”
Throughout the episode, Driver continued to deliver this sort of warped version of season’s greetings. Even when he wasn’t playing a version of himself, he was throwing himself into characters who were cranky and obstinate and, frankly, just weird. Whereas some lauded actors come onto SNL to prove they can be goofy, Driver, who was hosting for the fourth time, uses his natural intensity to derive laughs from just how serious he is. I don’t think the real Adam Driver, who is starring as Enzo Ferrari in Michael Mann’s Ferrari this year, is truly perturbed about “wokeness” or all that insecure about the size of his genitals, but he convincingly played the role of Adam Driver as a reactionary who believed Santa could help him with these problems.
As an actor, Driver is known for his almost severe and often idiosyncratic dedication to his craft. A 2019 New Yorker profile described how, when he was studying at Juilliard, he would run five miles to school every day and eat an entire chicken for lunch. One of his most famous onscreen gestures is punching a wall in the film Marriage Story during an argument. This would seemingly make him an odd fit for SNL, but as he has proved in his many appearances, he’s actually a great match for sketch comedy in part because he refuses to treat the material as any lesser than his other work. He could be doing the silliest thing imaginable and he would still be stone-faced.
This was especially noticeable in an episode leading into Christmas, where a number of the sketches were about the staid traditions that come around this time of year. Take, for instance, the pre-taped bit “Old Friends.” Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman played a man and his wife visiting his parents for the holidays. In his childhood bedroom, she remarked on a picture of him as a kid with a former pal. Day’s character decided to reach out to said companion, Keith, played by Driver. At first the interaction seemed sweet, but then it turned out that Keith had become a sex offender and onetime sperm-bank janitor who replaced the samples with his own sperm, and whose crimes were the subject of a Netflix documentary. Driver expertly played Keith as a sad sack whose loneliness just matched his menace. As Day wavered between feeling sorry for Keith and being horrified, so did we.
That ability to hold a well of anger also came up in a sketch where Driver played a mustachioed man setting food on a table for a holiday gathering while saying “beep beep,” as if he was a little car. His niceness was challenged by another man (Andrew Dismukes) with the same facial hair who also had a penchant for saying “beep beep” as he put down his dish. They reached an impasse where they both said “beep beep” at the same time, and you could truly believe, despite the softness of his voice, that Driver might have turned to violence if Dismukes did not yield.
Still, perhaps the triumph of Driver’s dedication came during a moment that eschewed any Christmas theme. Playing a creepy baby with full command of vocabulary on his first airplane ride, Driver refused to let the fact that he had doll arms take away from his commitment. His screams were powerful, and his face when he pooped in his diaper was a masterful display of concentration.
You don’t have to be a great actor to be a great SNL host, but Adam Driver is both because he sees the drama in absurdity. The holiday season is an absurd time of year. Driver, however, offered a dose of creepiness as a welcome antidote to saccharine festiveness.