Matt Damon made his third appearance as host of Saturday Night Live on May 9, jumping straight into political satire with a cold open set at a Washington bar where his Brett Kavanaugh ran into Colin Jost's Pete Hegseth and Aziz Ansari's Kash Patel.
The sketch placed the three Trump-linked figures at Martin's Tavern, the real Georgetown watering hole, with Kavanaugh arriving still in his judicial robe and carrying a gavel. The choice of setting was pointed: both Hegseth and Kavanaugh faced questions during their confirmation hearings about excessive drinking.
The exchanges came fast. "Can you believe I just, like, started a war?" Jost's Hegseth asked. Damon's Kavanaugh shot back, "Can you believe I ended abortion? Your body, my choice." When Hegseth asked how the war was going, he answered his own question: "Oh, it's totally chill. It's like me at a DWI checkpoint. It completely blew over."
Ansari reprised his Patel role for the second consecutive week, arriving at the bar with a custom bottle of FBI-branded bourbon â a reference to reporting that the real Patel has traveled with personalized branded bourbon bearing the FBI shield. "Yes, somehow this is a real thing that I, the FBI director, has made," Ansari's Patel announced. "I bring my own alcohol to bars because sometimes they think I'm a kid with a fake ID."
The sketch also riffed on the Supreme Court's recent decision affecting the Voting Rights Act. Kavanaugh held up a drawing of an irregular shape, claiming it was "the new voting district that I approved in Tennessee," before correcting himself: "Actually, no, that's a field sobriety test. They told me to draw a circle."
The cold open closed with Damon's Kavanaugh revealing a secret to the group. "We're gonna let Trump do a third term," he said, waving off concerns that it would be unconstitutional. "It was! But Trump found the original Constitution and at the end, he wrote, 'Sike!' We're gonna live forever!" The three then jumped up and down singing Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" directly into the camera.
In his monologue, Damon leaned into the Mother's Day timing of the episode and plugged his upcoming role in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. "I'm really excited because I have a new movie coming out. It's called The Odyssey," he said. "And it's in theaters not this weekend, not next weekend, but nine weekends from now. Mid-July, baby."
Damon previously hosted SNL in December 2018 and October 2002. His third stint came more than seven years after his second appearance, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
