Live From New York

It is an enduring if largely unspoken truth that every new cast member on Saturday Night Live feels the pressure to break out. The show is an ensemble, but you don’t achieve stardom as a collective. In the most important comedy career incubator of the modern age, not every embryo hatches—for every Will Ferrell or Amy Poehler, there is a John Milhiser or Emily Prager. Newbies in particular must navigate being a team player and projecting humility while also plotting their ascent.

Another truth: a good way to ascend quickly is to get a character on “Weekend Update.” SNL’s parody news segment was the show’s first hit skit back when the proverbial water cooler was an actual water cooler. From a personal branding perspective, it’s a rare opportunity for cast members to get a solo moment in the spotlight. The “Update”-to-icon pipeline is real: Gilda Radner killed as Roseanne Roseannadanna; Mike Myers and Dana Carvey were excellent as Wayne and Garth; Adam Sandler became a holiday staple with his Hanukkah and Thanksgiving songs. More recently, Bobby Moynihan channelled everyone’s drunkest drunk uncle, and Bowen Yang was the outraged iceberg that took down the Titanic. This past February, Veronika Slowikowska unveiled Beth’s Maid of Honour, Katie, a bridesmaid incapable of delivering her wedding speech without veering into the day’s grittiest headlines. “I’m not here to talk about Beth; her Scrabble addiction; her dog, Skittles; or her best-friend-turned-husband, Cody,” Katie announced, mic in one hand, glass of prosecco in the other, before launching into a treatise on a Mexican drug cartel. El Mencho, she explained, had been killed on Sunday, “or as Beth and I like to call it, ‘bottomless mimosa day.’”

For anyone who has ever been in a wedding party or spent time in the company of women for whom “rosé all day” is an organized religion, Katie is someone you already know—down to the basic-b updo, the pursed lips that punctuate every sly statement and the signature catch phrase (“but seriously”). For Slowikowska, the bit was the slam dunk that punctuated an already impressive season. By the time the credits rolled, she had appeared in four other skits and set a record for most screen time in a single episode among new cast members (at least for as long as these things have been publicly tracked).

Slowikowska is from Barrie, and as a Canadian on SNL, she takes her place in a storied lineup that includes Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Norm Macdonald, Martin Short, Mark McKinney and at least one quarter of Bowen Yang, who was born in Brisbane but grew up in Montreal. She is also from the internet, where she built a large and devoted following playing a socially clueless, jaw-clenchingly awkward version of herself. When she moved to the States three years ago, she thought her comedy TikToks might open a few doors. She had no idea they would be the door. To date, a video of Slowikowska giving her dad a giant flatscreen TV for his birthday only to drop it in the driveway has been viewed more than 20 million times. She films unhinged-girl-meets-grounded-boy sketches in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her comedy partner, Kyle Chase. Their schtick birthed a portmanteau (“Veronikyle”) and a rabid fandom. A recent profile in the cool-kid fashion magazine High Snobiety argued that, to a certain subset of people on the internet, the kitchen where Veronikyle record much of their content is as famous as the living room in Friends.

It’s those kinds of chronically online fans that SNL was courting with its last round of hires: Slowikowska, Jeremy Culhane (another TikTok star), Ben Marshall (a member of the digital short crew Please Don’t Destroy) and Kam Patterson (part of the Kill Tony comedy bro podcast, an offshoot of the Joe Rogan universe). Collectively, their casting suggests that SNL’s famously autocratic patriarch, Lorne Michaels (another Canadian), is ceding ground to the algorithm, though Michaels downplays the correlation. “Our audience has always stayed relatively young,” he said on the Emmy red carpet last fall, “and more so now with TikTok.”

Related: Untold stories from the early years of Second City, the group that changed comedy

Michaels was at the Emmys to accept the best live broadcast special award for “SNL50: The Anniversary Special,” part of the show’s golden jubilee extravaganza. “SNL50” was pure nostalgia porn, with headlines in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter trumpeting that there hadn’t been a ticket this hot in a decade. But Michaels has never been much for dwelling on the good old days. To him, the flashy festivities were about the future, about leveraging goodwill for the next 50 years. And on Saturday, February 28, that future was sitting behind the “Weekend Update” desk, wrapped in satin, well past tipsy and cracking wise about the Epstein files.

In Susan Morrison’s 2025 biography, Lorne, she explains that one of the reasons the Toronto-bred Michaels left for the US was because he’d come to disdain the “everyone gets their turn mentality” he’d witnessed during his time as a writer and producer at the CBC. In New York, he took a different tack. “If a performer is on a roll, killing in several shows in a row, Michaels takes advantage of the arc,” Morrison writes. For Michaels, momentum is everything. And this year, Slowikowska is his rookie to beat.

Most SNL devotees will throw down arguing that their cast—whoever was on the show when they first watched it in their basement rec room or college dorm—was the best cast ever. That’s no accident. Youthful, zeitgeisty energy has always been the secret sauce. When the show premiered in the mid-’70s, its cast had come up in the fumes of the Nixon era, and their damn-the-man countercultural satire spoke for a generation. Eddie Murphy’s ’80s was a time of unapologetic flash that gave way to the frat boys (Myers and Carvey), followed by the alt frat boys who liked grunge (Sandler and Chris Farley).

The Trump era has pushed the show forward along two tracks: a steady diet of escalating insanity emanating from the White House (Colin Jost’s recent portrayals of Pete Hegseth are a gift) and a pivot toward the ephemeral, irony-soaked sensibility of the internet. At the risk of sounding like the Church Lady, hyperspecificity is one of the tools young people today use to push back against the isolation of digital life; the popular mantra “if you know, you know” may seem exclusionary, but it’s really about creating a sense of we. Lacking any kind of recognizable punchline or payoff, cringe comedy is a coping mechanism for a generation that has watched the future they were promised go up in flames like the dumpster-fire meme.

Related: “Lorne Michaels wanted to stay in Canada”: This biographer is pulling back the curtain on the king of comedy

For Slowikowska, the anti-comedy instinct was implanted even earlier. At five years old, she performed the entire soundtrack of the VeggieTales Christmas special—from an animated series in which vegetables reenact stories from the Bible—for family and friends. At one point, she fell over by accident and got a laugh. So she fell over again, and again, and again—20 times, maybe more. As one of the eldest in the group of cousins and family friends who got together for birthdays and holidays, Slowikowska was the resident auteur. For the first communion of her younger sister, Hanna, she wrote, directed and narrated a piece of Super Mario fanfic. “I got to play Princess Peach, so I was happy,” says Hanna.

As a pre-teen, Slowikowska watched SNL with her dad, a former monk who moved from Poland to Canada with her mom. (He studied theology at the University of Toronto and later got a job at the Honda plant in Barrie; his wife bought a bridal shop that she still runs today.) Slowikowska didn’t quite get the show’s humour and could rarely keep her eyes open past midnight, but she desperately wanted to be in on the joke.

At St. Joan of Arc Catholic, as at every high school, each clique had its own culture. There were the teens who went nuts for Twilight and The Hunger Games, the ones who preferred Korean New Wave (or at least pretended to), and the weirdos like Slowikowska who loved Nacho Libre, Napoleon Dynamite, Nirvanna the Band the Show and SNL. Her cast was the one from the early 2010s, starring fellow weirdo Kristen Wiig (as Gilly, the precocious preschooler, and Penelope, the eternally awkward party guest) and Fred Armisen (whose sketches Slowikowska now studies like sacred texts). She loved the raw, DIY spirit of the Lonely Island crew—their video shorts “I’m on a Boat,” “Lazy Sunday” and “Dick in a Box” hit as YouTube was exploding, setting a template for viral internet humour.

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“I think that’s what comedy is,” says Slowikowska. “Like, if you know, you know”

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Slowikowska looked like your average Abercrombie teen—all baby tees and sideswept bangs—but she was also the kind of zealous song-and-dance theatre kid who took part in drama competitions. After graduating, she moved to Toronto to study musical theatre at Randolph College, a performing arts academy for Broadway hopefuls. Though everyone there had been a star in high school, Slowikowska was a standout—she stunned as Wendla, the lead in her graduating class’s production of Spring Awakening. But, even then, she sensed that pretty blonde girls who could sing weren’t uncommon. A pretty blonde girl willing to bet it all on “Do not go in there” bathroom humour, on the other hand…

She auditioned for the Conservatory, a sketch-and-improv feeder school for Second City, taking classes there before moving on to a feature player role with the Bad Dog Theatre Company. Guest spots on Degrassi, Murdoch Mysteries and Baroness Von Sketch Show followed. Then came her first big break: a recurring role on What We Do in the Shadows, a cult-classic mockumentary series about vampire roommates on Staten Island. For a comedy nerd, the chance to work with Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Matt Berry (Toast of London) was like getting tapped to play bass in the Pixies. But then the pandemic hit, and the jobs quickly dried up. Like every self-respecting Zillennial, Slowikowska was on TikTok, so she started posting her comedy for fun, to keep boredom at bay and to burn off restless energy. Being “wired anxious,” as she puts it, has been a bit of a secret weapon. “It’s why I have so much attention to detail, why I’m hyper-aware of how people are,” she says. Her first clip was a send-up of the self-serious aspiring screenwriter—she plays a woman busy working on a script she describes as “a coming-of-age meets The Sopranos, Martin Scorsese, Spike Jonze, Succession and SpongeBob SquarePants.” By 2022, Slowikowska was working behind the register at Craig’s Cookies, saving money to move to Los Angeles to pursue film and TV.

Kyle Chase started following her after watching a TikTok where Slowikowska is shooting hoops while describing the premise for an original TV show idea she’s had—that just happens to be America’s Funniest Home Videos, right down to the theme song. He sent her a DM asking if she wanted to collaborate with him and his friend, writer-director Michael Rees. Their first meeting was a convergence of comedy soulmates who shared all the same nerdy references. The plan was to join forces on a movie script, but their work sessions kept getting sidetracked when one of them would come up with an idea for a short video. Their “just for fun” side projects were fuelled by the kind of creative freedom that comes with assuming nobody is ever going to watch. Except people did watch: thousands of views became tens of thousands, then millions.

Their first TikTok to go viral cast Slowikowska as a woman who doesn’t want her friends to smash her face into her birthday cake—except that she really, really does. (The 2023 post has 4.4 million views and counting.) Then there was the “Do you even like me?” girl, the friend who wants to be told she’s a good singer and the “Do not go in there” video (in which Slowikowska won’t let Chase go into the bathroom after her). Their content doesn’t have to be viewed in order, but there is a loose narrative arc: Chase is the exasperated, clueless straight man, and Slowikowska is highly annoying and totally in love with him. (Fans who obsess over whether Chase and Slowikowska are a couple IRL refer to their are-they-or-aren’t-they status as “the lore.”)

When Slowikowska was coming up in comedy, the conventional wisdom was, “Your audience is dumb. Your audience is like a newborn baby. You have to explain everything,” she says. Her work, by contrast, is driven by the opposite idea. The comments she treasures are along the lines of “LMFAO—I don’t have anyone to send this video to.” Those followers feel like she has crawled into the recesses of their psyche to pluck out something specific and unique to them that nobody else could possibly appreciate—even if the popularity of her work debunks this premise. “I think that’s what comedy is,” says Slowikowska. “Like, if you know, you know.” It’s not really about being funny so much as it is about finding a way to express a shared sensibility, a way of belonging. Which is also the engine that drives SNL.

I first met Slowikowska in the summer of 2024, when I interviewed her for a series about Canadian up-and-comers. This was after her explosion on TikTok, her appearance on the Amazon Prime show Davey & Jonesie’s Locker and her supporting turn on Exmas, a holiday movie starring Leighton Meester. Her digital fame had led to some live shows, including a spot in the Netflix Is a Joke Festival, part of a North American comedy tour. She had a bunch of dates scheduled for that fall, but before my piece went to print, she let me know she might not go ahead with the rest of the tour. “You mean your schedule might change?” I asked. She replied that, if this something happened, “everything would change.” What I didn’t know then was that she was waiting to hear from SNL.

The show’s audition process is another mystery steeped in lore. You have five minutes to do whatever you think is funny: impressions, stand-up, strip naked. Slowikowska swears she doesn’t remember what she did—nerves, adrenalin and time have wiped her memory. She barely even recalls being invited to meet with Michaels after her set—a good sign, in theory. Still, she walked away feeling like it wasn’t her time, a hunch later confirmed by her agent. “I guess that could have been my villain origin story,” she jokes—SNL hopeful loses out on dream job and spends the rest of her days haunting 30 Rock like the Phantom of the Opera. But, instead, good things started piling up. Within days of losing out on the SNL gig, she was offered a part on the Netflix series Tires, playing a love interest who is both crush-worthy and wildly embarrassing. (The show’s creator, stand-up comedian Shane Gillis, knows a little something about being burned by SNL: in 2019, he was dropped from the cast after old podcast clips of him making racist comments emerged online.) A handful of live shows in Ireland and Scotland were next, followed by a guest role on the Natasha Lyonne comedic procedural Poker Face.

Early last August, she was shooting Close to Nowhere, a romantic comedy co-starring Luke Kirby in which she plays a character named Coco. “She’s an ambitious woman on the brink of being crazy, which definitely spoke to me,” says Slowikowska. And the movie’s writer-director, Sam Carroll, is a friend—another bonus. “I was figuring out what my life would look like without SNL,” she says in a way that suggests infinite trust in the universe. She didn’t get to that level of zen on her own. To stay grounded, Slowikowska started seeing a therapist when she blew up on TikTok. After the SNL audition, she doubled down, focusing on self-acceptance and banishing negative self-talk.

Midway through filming, she auditioned again for SNL, and the experience was entirely different. “It was this feeling of you are deserving, you’re totally good enough to do this,” she says. “I think maybe as a woman, or as a Canadian, I have struggled with the opposite.” She remembers everything: pulling off an impression of Lyonne, doing a bit where she’s a newscaster with a crush on the cameraman and channelling Harry Styles trying on a dress for the first time. Under the hot lights, she was present, calm. And this time, she got the gig.

In SNL’s 50th anniversary documentary, Tina Fey explains how pitting cast members against one another is key to the show’s success—a feature, not a bug. “Even though everyone at SNL is working together to make one thing, it is built on competition. It is built for like, ‘See you at the table,’ ” she says, referring to the weekly table read where writers and cast members gather to pitch their sketches to the boss. The SNL Writer’s Prayer, created by former staffer Andy Breckman, speaks to that jockeying for position: “Dear Lord, please let my sketch kill harder than anyone else’s sketch. But please let me also be perceived as a team player.”

Slowikowska made her first big kill in the season’s third episode. Like during every other show week, the work began on Monday morning in Michaels’s office, where the team gathered to welcome the celebrity host (Sabrina Carpenter) and newer cast members sat in a huddle on the floor. Everyone yelled out their best set-up ideas for consideration. It was largely a pantomime to make the host feel like one of the gang: few Monday pitches ever come to fruition. The real ideas started coming together on Tuesday, although many had been marinating for ages. The genesis of one of Slowikowska’s pitches, “Appliance Store,” went back to a visit she’d paid years earlier to her parents in Barrie. She noticed that their washer and dryer emitted little songs to signal the end of a cycle, and she added it to the list of “might-be-somethings” that she keeps on her phone.

A good idea is nothing without the right host. The classic example is “More Cowbell,” a spoof of VH1’s Behind the Music and arguably SNL’s most iconic sketch. It was cut twice before making it to air the week Christopher Walken hosted, and now the idea of anyone other than Walken’s faux music producer uttering the directive “more cowbell” is unthinkable. Slowikowska figured a triple-platinum pop star who had already appeared on SNL three times was a good choice to play the washer to her dryer, so she pitched Carpenter the idea in the hallway outside her office: the machines would become song-and-dance girls from the 1920s, jazz hands and all. It was a cult sketch—deliberately absurdist and instantly beloved by a devoted pocket of fans.

She and Carpenter also appeared together in “Snack Boyz,” a parody of MD Foodie Boyz, a hit podcast hosted by teen food reviewers. (Watching a bunch of adult women in hoodies use the 6-7 slang of Gen Alpha is funnier than it sounds.) She also had a small part in the show’s cold open, most of which she spent mugging in the background. But, at the end, she got to look straight into the camera and yell, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”—an honour all cast members vie for and some never get. The week Carpenter hosted, Slowikowska was asked to attend the cast dinner for the first time, a Tuesday-night tradition held at Lattanzi, an Italian restaurant in midtown. It is not an open invitation, nor is it a guaranteed one, which highlights the ways SNL is like high school—except the prom king is a notoriously sphinxlike octogenarian from Forest Hill.

Slowikowska shares her office with Ben Marshall, another cast newbie who has worked as a staff writer for the past two seasons. “Even in those smaller parts, she really brings something,” he says. “I think that’s where her acting background comes in.” Marshall met Slowikowska before she was hired and was familiar with her style. When they sat down with some of the show’s other writers to work on a sketch for episode 10, they wanted to showcase the kind of stuff she does on TikTok. Their creation was “Guy’s Girl,” a sketch where host Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things brings his girlfriend to watch football with his buddies. Slowikowska’s character, desperate to be one of the boys, takes bonding to humiliating extremes. “Hey, guys, guess what? Boobs are here,” she hollers, barely through the door, punctuating her greeting by honking a set of invisible hooters and then performing a one-sided motorboat. I watched her performance from a sliver of space between my fingers, contorting away from the screen as if whatever she was doing might be contagious. Slowikowska is often, and accurately, compared to Kristen Wiig: the musical theatre chops, the absurdism, the passing physical resemblance. But, in the chaotic, high-octane spirit of “Guy’s Girl,” you can feel the ghost of Chris Farley. “We knew we had something when she did that first line at table read and people burst out laughing,” says Marshall.

Slowikowska’s office mate says she gets youth culture in a way many of the older cast members don’t. He cites pre-taped parody music videos like “Cousin Planet” (a concept that crystalized after Thanksgiving, where the joke is, Where do cousins go for the rest of the year?) and “Car Door” (about how modern car door handles are so complicated that you end up trapped). The latter sketch, starring that week’s host, Heated Rivalry’s Connor Storrie, was cut for time during the live taping but did huge numbers online after the fact. To much of the internet, SNL isn’t a 90-minute show that airs on Saturdays at 11:30 p.m.—it’s a series of short clips that show up on “For you” pages.

Back in his days as head writer, Seth Meyers used to greet new hires by saying, “Congratulations, you’ll never talk about anything else again for the rest of your life.” His statement is a nod to SNL’s legacy and the public’s enduring fascination with the show. Fans are just as interested in the behind-the-scenes mythos and machinations as they are in the comedy. Does everyone really stay up all night working at the office? Do they still party like they did in the Belushi era? In Lorne, Morrison jokes about how the sex, drugs, and rock and roll part of the show is in the past: “These days, the cast hoards Ozempic,” she writes. Slowikowska doesn’t drink during the week. Sundays are for self-care, whether that’s going to the gym or lying on the couch mainlining reality TV. When I inquire about her boss, she says she interacts with Michaels more than she expected. But, when I ask for a specific example of an interaction, any interaction, she hedges. “I don’t know. I’ll pass,” she concludes, probably wisely, after a long pause. It’s a far cry from the pointed ribbing certain alumni engage in: Bill Hader does an impression of Michaels name-dropping serial killers, and Mike Myers famously based Dr. Evil on his former boss. Cast members who are still busy making their mark know better than to talk out of school—mostly.

This past January, Slowikowska’s fellow rookie Kam Patterson did a stand-up set where he called his workplace “gay as fuck.” He said that, as a 26-year-old Black guy, he’d never seen the show and had no idea what he’d signed up for. If the point was to hit Daddy where it hurts, he probably succeeded, but when every move counts, it mostly just read like an unforced error. SNL is the big leagues, but there are goals beyond getting past the audition, past that first sketch, past “Live from New York,” and even past that one iconic character people will still be talking about when we’re all dead and buried and only Lorne Michaels remains. The GOATs didn’t just figure out how to work on the show; they made the show work for them. Meyers and Jimmy Fallon host their own eponymous late-night shows; Poehler recently won a best podcast Emmy for Good Hang; Fey got Michaels to produce her love letter to Studio 8H, 30 Rock, as well as all three of her Mean Girls iterations (the 2004 and 2024 movies and the 2018 Broadway musical).

Of course, Slowikowska is just getting started. When I ask about what’s next, she says she wants to spend the summer hiatus winding down and hanging out with the family and friends she neglected during her first season. She doesn’t complain about the pressure she’s under, nor does she describe herself as anything close to a breakout. It must feel amazing, I posit, to have her talent validated, to get so much screen time and create so many unforgettable moments this early on—to be so clearly killing it. “Is that how you feel?” I ask. She says that she hasn’t had the opportunity yet to zoom out (“I’m still so in it”), and then our time is up, and she really does have to go. She has therapy. And boundaries. And three more episodes until the season is over and she can finally take a breath.

This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.