Ashley Padilla Is Making SNL History Feel Alive Again

Jon Schneider is the founder and main host of LateNighter’s podcast partner, the Saturday Night Network.

Every so often, Saturday Night Live gives its most obsessive fans the thing they are always watching for: the moment a cast member stops looking like a prospect and starts looking like the future.

That moment is part of the fun of following SNL closely. Every season begins with a familiar ritual: fans squinting at the new featured players, trying to figure out who has “it,” who needs time, who might disappear, and who—once in a while—might be announcing the start of something much bigger. It is part scouting report, part fantasy draft, part historical parlor game. Padilla was one of those questions last season. This season, she became the answer.

That thrill has been baked into the show from the beginning.

SNL was built on a series of radical ideas: a live comedy show assembled in less than a week, a different celebrity host each episode, and a dead time slot transformed into appointment television. But the show’s most enduring innovation may have been its cast: young comic performers, many barely known beyond small theater scenes, thrust onto live television and forced to sink or swim in front of millions.

For diehard fans, watching those performers either find their footing or fade into the background has become its own kind of sport.

The original cast, famously dubbed “The Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” produced the first and most immediate case study in Chevy Chase. A 32-year-old writer and performer from The National Lampoon Radio Hour, Chase quickly became the face of Saturday Night, anchoring “Weekend Update,” turning President Gerald Ford into a recurring physical-comedy target, and departing after just 30 episodes to pursue a movie career.

Chase’s rapid ascent established one of the show’s enduring promises: that SNL could take a performer from relative obscurity and turn them into one of the biggest comedy stars in America. In the decades since, that possibility has remained central to the show’s appeal, even as the definition of obscurity has changed dramatically.

Today, new cast members rarely arrive as true unknowns in the traditional sense. James Austin Johnson broke through online with his Trump impression before joining the show. Marcello Hernández and Veronika Slowikowska came in with substantial social followings. Jane Wickline had been part of TikTok’s live sketch-comedy series Stapleview. In an era when comics can build audiences directly on social platforms, SNL is no longer always the first place viewers discover them.

That is part of what made Ashley Padilla’s arrival feel almost old-fashioned.

Padilla joined the cast in 2024 alongside Wickline and stand-up comic Emil Wakim. A member of the Groundlings Main Company—a pipeline that has produced many SNL performers, going all the way back to original cast member and Groundlings co-founder Laraine Newman—Padilla came to Studio 8H with comedy credentials but relatively little public profile. Yes, she’d had a few bit parts, but there was no online fanbase waiting for her, no viral persona for audiences to map onto the show, no built-in narrative beyond the basic question that follows every new featured player: Can she make the leap?

At first, the answer came quietly. With the 2024 presidential election consuming much of the show’s attention, and the build-up to SNL50 dominating the larger conversation around the series, Padilla’s rookie season was easy to overlook. She brought a Groundlings sketch, “I Got One,” to head writers Alison Gates and Kent Sublette and earned an early showcase opposite host Bill Burr. She followed that with “Italian Restaurant Commercial” in the Paul Mescal episode. But for long stretches, she was largely in the background—including, by her own telling, appearing onstage but not on camera during the 50th anniversary special.

Then came Joann from JOANN Fabrics.

Padilla’s March 2025 breakout was the kind of moment attentive SNL fans are trained to notice: not just a funny sketch, but a signal. The timing was specific. The character was fully formed. The performance had command. It was the sort of appearance that makes you stop thinking of a new cast member as someone trying to earn space and start wondering how much space the show might eventually give them.

By the time Padilla entered her second season as one of only five women in the cast, the stage was set for a real test. Would that late-season momentum continue? Week after week, she has answered that question emphatically.

Her Season 51 run has included standout turns in “Parent-Teacher Conference” with Bad Bunny, “Office Surprise” with Sabrina Carpenter, “Two People Who Just Hooked Up” with Andrew Dismukes, “Haircut” with Glen Powell, “Let’s Find Love!” with Josh O’Connor, “Confidence Class” with Teyana Taylor, “MAGA Mom” with Alexander Skarsgård, “Passing Notes” with Ryan Gosling, “Kathy” with Jack Black, and “My Ex” with Olivia Rodrigo.

The specifics vary from sketch to sketch, but the pattern is unmistakable: Padilla has quickly become a performer the show trusts to drive a piece rather than simply support it.

In just over a year, she has gone from promising upstart to Season 51’s defining performer, leading the cast in screen time and appearances, and drawing glowing tributes from LateNighter, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times (which went so far as to credit her with inventing her own comedy rhythm that it dubbed “The Padilla Pause”).

Any cast member having this kind of season would be celebrated by the show’s fandom. But there is something about Padilla’s trajectory that feels especially connected to the show’s larger mythology. This is the old SNL promise, updated for a new era: someone arrives without much fanfare, starts stealing sketches, and suddenly the audience is watching a star being assembled in real time.

That is where the historical conversation gets interesting.

When Chase left the show in 1976, it would have been easy to declare him the greatest cast member SNL had ever produced, because there was not much history to argue with yet. Fifty years later, the debate is much richer—and much more fun. Is it Phil Hartman (aka “The Glue”), whose versatility made him one of the most valuable performers the show has ever had? Is it Eddie Murphy or Will Ferrell, both of whom helped carry the show through defining eras? Is it Kristen Wiig, who seemed genetically engineered for Studio 8H?

Like the GOAT debate in sports, the SNL version is inherently subjective, yet endlessly fascinating. Everyone has their own criteria: peak, longevity, versatility, star power, degree of difficulty, impact on the show, impact beyond the show. What makes Padilla’s rise so exciting is not that she has already answered those questions. It’s that she’s made them worth asking again.

It is, of course, far too early to know where Padilla’s SNL career ultimately lands. A great season is not the same thing as a great tenure, and the show has humbled plenty of performers who seemed, for a moment, unstoppable. But for the kind of fan who watches SNL not only week to week but era to era, this is the fun part: recognizing the moment when a promising cast member starts to look like something more.

For most viewers, the takeaway is simpler: Ashley Padilla is making Saturday Night Live funnier right now, and that is more than enough. But for those of us who love the history of this show, her rise offers an added thrill. Every so often, SNL gives you the chance to watch a performer go from unknown to undeniable while the cameras are still rolling. Padilla is having that kind of moment now. Wherever it ultimately leads, it is the kind of emergence that reminds you why this show’s history is still being written live.

Padilla has one more chance to add to that story this season. She and the rest of the SNL cast return this Saturday night for the Season 51 finale, with Will Ferrell hosting and Paul McCartney as musical guest.

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