Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | May 4, 2026
I’m not a very superstitious person. I’ll cross paths with black cats, say Macbeth in a theater, and I take the lord’s name in vain constantly (does that count?). However, I don’t like getting ahead of myself. That is something I’ve mostly learned from being a baseball fan. It feels like the moment I start saying my favorite team (all hail the Texas Rangers), they will start to lose. I have no concrete proof, and it doesn’t help that the Rangers have been a mostly terrible franchise (save for one magic year), but I’ve seen them blow what seemed like a certain win on several occasions.
While I may not try to call games in their favor anymore, there is one thing I can say with certainty, even though it hasn’t happened yet: Ashley Padilla will be remembered as one of Saturday Night Live’s greatest cast members. I’m so confident that I don’t mind potentially jinxing it. She’s always dialed in, even if it’s a smaller role; she manages to make absurd gestures and faces feel believable on every character, and, when she does want to ground her part in some kind of reality, even for a moment, it hits perfectly. The woman is a comedic genius, and her newest sketch proves it.
Olivia Rodrigo hosted a hilarious episode this week, and the sketch called My Ex was my absolute favorite. In it, Rodrigo is attending Marcello Hernandez’s birthday party. He apologizes for inviting her ex, played by Ben Marshall, but she concocts a plan to have Tommy Brennan pretend to be her date, something he calmly goes along with. Not to be outdone, Marshall asks Padilla to pretend to be his date, and, in classic Padilla fashion, she takes things way too far.
Her character has big “lapsed theater kid” energy, which helps sell things immediately. She’s so excited to get involved in Marshall’s ruse and plays it up like an audience member being asked to participate in a community theater production of Spelling Bee. She immediately starts making things weird, earnestly asking if it matters that she’s had a baby before. Then, she spends the sketch expertly taking each scenario too far, causing a bigger scene than necessary, and giving Marshall deep regrets for asking her.
I’ve been watching Ben Marshall for years now, and he’s perfectly suited to be the straight man in a sketch like this. His videos with Please Don’t Destroy now look like a kind of training ground, and I don’t even mean the ones they did for SNL. Obviously, Lorne saw something in the only non-Nepo in the group, and he’s fit perfectly into sketches like this since being promoted to cast member, and that’s doubly true when he has Padilla to play off of.
Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much control Padilla has over her facial expressions. She’s able to morph her face so precisely that, in certain situations, she almost looks like a completely different person. She can go so big that she resembles more of a cartoon character, but you also just buy it. It doesn’t feel forced because she knows exactly when to go to that well. I wouldn’t be surprised if she spends ample time throughout her week just looking in the mirror and seeing what faces she can make.
She also pulls something off here that she has done a couple of times this season: she breaks a little bit and then recovers. I know there was a certain cast member who didn’t care for the hilarious sketch she did with Ryan Gosling that was constructed to make them break, but that was a different situation. Here, after several moments of Marshall trying not to laugh, Padilla stands up to make a proclamation to the room, some mashed potatoes fall off her face and into her drink, and she stifles a laugh like a pro.
Ashley Padilla is just wonderful, and this sketch is another incredible example. We even get a brief interaction between her and SNL legend Kenan Thompson before the bit was through. It’s wild to think how early we are in her time on the show. There’s still so much goodness left! And I genuinely wish they still compiled people’s best sketches onto DVDs. I guess I can just go make a playlist of her sketches on YouTube, but it’s just not the same.
