Jake Gyllenhaal

The actor returned to 'SNL' more than 15 years after his hosting debut. During his monologue, he made a call back to his last appearance with some singing.

It’s made to go see in the theaters. “It’s made for the theaters. More than 15 years after making his Saturday Night Live debut, the 41-year-old actor returned to studio 8H to serve as this week’s guest host.

'Saturday Night Live' recap: Jake Gyllenhaal hosts 'SNL' season 47, episode 17, with musical guest Camila Cabello.

And "Bam Bam" is the second single, a tropical-inspired bop with a salsa-infused chorus and reggaeton flavor. Texts are exchanged, and Punkie asks Jake to read them aloud, giving him the opportunity to say "Girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl" in a voice. "I have a normal body temperature of 108," he assures the concerned cowboys. When a weed ( Kyle Mooney) appears, he wants to choke the flowers. And Melissa Villaseñor in a decent-sized role! Gyllenhaal, Redd, Strong, and Sarah Sherman play flowers greeted by a horny bee (Yang). While the older flowers aren't thrilled that he's rubbing up against all of them, the youngest bulb (Redd) is excited when it's his turn. "You did the double tap," chides the host (Thompson). An embarrassed Gyllenhaal liked a photo of a bikini picture, despite having a girlfriend. It's the little things in life: zero unopened emails, not losing a Chapstick, meeting cast members from the original Real World. "I grew out of a peanut allergy," shares McKinnon. Yang hated Hamilton before it was cool. Gage and Rick (Mikey Day and Gyllenhaal) are designing a lakefront oasis for the milquetoast Pat (James Austin Johnson) and Lillian ( Heidi Gardner). The catch? "Acting is a really stupid job," Gyllenhaal continues. And with the ease of someone who has been on the show for many years. This is a straightforward, sort of banal yet well-intentioned tribute to Jackson's historic confirmation.

Jake Gyllenhaal tonight returned as host of 'SNL', speaking in his opening monologue about his first appearance on the show way back in 2007.

“Then, I showed up on set and was like, ‘You’re looking at a guy who gained 10 pounds and doesn’t care about awards.'” “That was actually probably the least problematic thing in that episode, but looking back, I feel like I was a totally different person.” “That was like 400 Marvel movies ago,” the Ambulance star joked.

The photo revealed him performing a Dreamgirls spoof in drag, with Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, and Kristen Wiig as his spangled backup singers, “to promote a ...

Gyllenhaal said that he never thought he would have an opportunity to host the show again. “But being here tonight,” he said, “it feels like everything is suddenly coming back.” Gyllenhaal then reprised the sketch — this time with Chloe Fineman, Ego Nwodim, and Cecily Strong backing him up — and sang Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” The photo revealed him performing a Dreamgirls spoof in drag, with Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, and Kristen Wiig as his spangled backup singers, “to promote a movie where I played a gay cowboy.”

Jake Gyllenhaal sang and then sang some more during his "Saturday Night Live" hosting stint.

“Pretty kinky right?” “Oh really, you gonna shoot me?! I’d like to see you try! “I was happy to do my part. “Don’t go forgetting which cup is a drink and which cup is full of piss,” the actor sang as he steered his big rig. “The problem was a lot of people took off their masks during the post-dinner orgy,” he cracked as an over-the-shoulder graphic showed a scene from “Eyes Wide Shut.”

This week, Jake Gyllenhaal returned to the Saturday Night Live stage for the first time in 15 years, or “400 Marvel movies ago,” as he said in the monologue ...

Playing the tubercular Doc Holliday, a sallow, sweaty Gyllenhaal farts, coughs blood into a handkerchief and sneezes gallons of stage blood and snot onto Alex Moffatt and Andrew Dismukes. Body-fluid humor works approximately 1% of the time (see Dan Akyroyd’s Julia Child bleeding out on set and Cecily Strong puking wine all over “Weekend Update”). This wasn’t one of them. The film appreciation show Lights Camera Achoo celebrates “sick performances in film,” a dubious premise that plays out dubiously. So “you’ll always have something to remember me by,” he tells a nearby hooker. That co-worker: Chucky, the murderous doll from the “Child’s Play” horror series (Sarah Sherman). This workplace contretemps has an additional layer: Chucky’s offended because he overheard the trio in the restroom comparing him to Janet (Aidy Bryant), a co-worker everybody hates. You can see exactly where this is going, and what you envision is basically what you get—a cascade of childish sex and fetish jokes. In “Spring Flowers,” Gyllenhaal, Sarah Sherman, Cecily Strong, and Chris Redd play flora in a garden who sing praises to spring before a series of increasingly undignified events unfurl. In sending up the often highly manufactured conflicts that surface on these shows as a matter of course, the writing went to pleasingly weird and occasionally laugh-out-loud places. It’s a solid concept executed well: Janet being everyone’s problem is a fun twist, Fineman’s character attributes Chucky’s eavesdropping to the new gender-neutral bathroom policy, and Gyllenhaal is particularly good as the unctuous HR lackey, telling Chucky that he belongs at the company because “each of us has a different story,” even as the doll repeatedly stabs his leg. “I squeeze a load of goop out of my butt and people eat it. “Dream Home Cousins” was a solid takeoff on that cockroach of cable and streaming, the HGTV build-my-house show. This week, Jake Gyllenhaal returned to the Saturday Night Live stage for the first time in 15 years, or “400 Marvel movies ago,” as he said in the monologue. Is it possible he thought SNL was beneath him for a while?)

Certainly there'd be no confusion regarding how to handle Jake Gyllenhaal's second-time hosting SNL this week, right? What's The Deal For The SNL Cold Open For ...

Only one visit to the Update desk this week, and it was the pair of trend forecasters (Aidy and Bowen) who remind us what’s IN and what’s OUT right now. Jake’s Johnny Goblin sings about sticking his hand in his pants after eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. He sings with Cecily and Andrew about blowing that horn for the kids, and about accidentally picking up El Chapo (Melissa)? it all sounds like Clancy T. Bachleratt and Jackie Snad have found kindred spirits to keep on truckin’. On the OUTS: Jogging to Kelly Clarkson (because she’s too busy with her talk show to motivate you); Waiting outside the fitting room for your partner; and making a noise before you sneeze that sounds like an orgasm. Speaking of things on SNL that’ll hit home for millions of viewers, Kenan hosted a game show with contestants (Chloe, Chris, Jake) forced to admit to why they really double-tapped the like button on specific Instagram photos and accounts. SNL recently set a similar sketch in the mens room, but this time the plot twists once the ladies realize that Chucky (yes, the doll from the Child’s Play movies) was in the stall listening to everything. Thankfully, nobody is harmed in this sketch, and after warning Jake not to do a voice when reading “gurl,” it’s all good. The first is this pre-taped parody of the Property Brothers finds Jake and Mikey Day as “Dream Home Cousins” looking to give just that to a couple played by JAJ and Heidi Gardner. Only mother-in-law Bea (Kate) has other ideas, and the cousins have completely remade their home to Bea’s specifications. The best showcases for how great Jake can be came in the final half-hour, though. They dedicate this song to the people in the middle, neither winners or losers, who might be bad at sex but at least you won’t be afraid or upset? Our man Jake is too busy reminiscing about how he first and last hosted SNL way back in 2007, when he dressed in drag for a Dreamgirls bit in that monologue, “and that was actually the leasst problematic thing in that episode.” Jake also disses his profession as “a really stupid job. And removing all the bathroom windows so “perverts and tuggers” can’t see mama Bea “make her dirt.” Kate knows how to play old lady cray cray. All in all, it’s a nod not only to the nation’s progress in breaking racial barriers, but also to how far SNL has come since a 2013 cold open with Kerry Washington in the White House where SNL had to mock itself for its lack of cast diversity.

Jake Gyllenhaal returned to Saturday Night Live over the weekend, his first time hosting since his 2007 debut, with musical guest Camila Cabello and special ...

Gyllenhaal honored Bubble Boy with a portrait and made a callback to Donnie Darko by wearing the same sweater during his goodbye. She was then joined by Willow Smith to perform the track " Psychofreak" off of her latest LP during her second performance. He explained that it made him forget "how to have fun." Gyllenhaal admitted, however, that he never thought SNL "would come calling" and ask him to host once more due to the fact that he hosted the show so long ago. "There I am in full drag, singing a song from Dreamgirls, to promote a movie where I played a gay cowboy," Gyllenhaal added. The actor, 41, made his return to Saturday Night Live as host over the weekend, after last leading the late-night NBC comedy sketch series in 2007.

The Ambulance star gives it his all but the sketches, taking in Ketanji Brown Jackson, Child'a Play and cabaret, aren't up to snuff.

The sketch is all over the place, but Johnson’s deranged outbursts and Gyllenhaal’s reading of sexually explicit text messages (which make use of lots of fish metaphors) in an ill-advised black female voice are the highlights of the episode. It’s on sight!” The danger of the situation continues to escalate, with the therapist dragging the couple into the conflict against their will. Gyllenhaal gives his best performance of the night as the “Patient Zero” of the old west in this slight, but enjoyably gross sketch. Dream Home Cousins is a show on HGTV in which the design for a young couple’s dream home turns into a nightmare after the husband’s aged mother decides to move in with them. Saturday Night Live opens at the White House, where President Biden (James Austin Johnson) congratulates Ketanji Brown Jackson (Ego Nwodim) on her historic confirmation to the supreme court. She calls upon historical barrier breakers for advice and guidance, including the late Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Kate McKinnon) and Thurgood Marshall (Kenan Thompson), “conductor of the underground railroad” Harriet Tubman (Punkie Johnson), and Jackie Robinson (Chris Redd).

Let's revisit some of the best moments from the April 9 episode of Saturday Night Live. Live from New York, it's Jake Gyllenhaal!

Stop jogging to Kelly Clarkson at the gym and if you have the urge to sneeze, then for the love of all that is holy, sneeze! He realized he didn’t have to go completely method in his work, and that his focus should be more on having fun. They’ve crunched the numbers and collected all the data from their mean computer and are ready to share their findings. The Senate recently confirmed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the replacement for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. That means that upon being sworn in, she will be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. This is a massive feat for the United States and all the people that helped pave the way for this to happen. He’s balanced an impressive on-screen career with films including Prisoners, Nightcrawler, and Stronger, with his rich stage work in projects such as Constellations, Sunday in the Park with George, and Sea Wall/A Life. He also joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as classic Spider-Man villain Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far from Home. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s also attached to star in 10 upcoming projects. Hard work paid off tremendously his senior year, when he booked a lead role in October Sky alongside Chris Cooper and Laura Dern, as well as the lead as Tevye in his school’s production of the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof. After a couple of years studying eastern religions at Columbia University, Jake realized he had to make a decision about his future.

Jake Gyllenhaal's best moment in this resolutely so-so episode of SNL came when, in his monologue, the Ambulance actor admitted that his whole past Method phase ...

But this Justice Jackson is never established as a character in her own right, something that sort of undermines the sketch’s assertion that the first Black woman on the Supreme Court is worthy of her own show-opener. Even in this wheezy parody of truck stop-specific, CD-only trucker ballads, with Aidy’s trucker extolling the virtues of Gyllenhaal’s amusingly named Johnny Goblin, and his greatest hits album, Truck You, You Truckin’ Truck. That’s cute enough, as is the bumper sticker that travelers Kyle and Ego find, reading, “My other car is a gun.” (If I haven’t seen that one in the wild, I probably will now.) That might be a function of this president not being as farcically hateful and stupid as the last, but it’s looking more like SNL just doesn’t have any point of view on Joe Biden other than “old.” Jason Sudeikis’ Biden thrived the more Sudeikis leaned into the Onion-spawned, meme-worthy Uncle Joe persona, which may not have been any deeper as characterizations go, but was much funnier. Honestly (and since I’m up late enough that they’ve gone up online), either of the two cut for time sketches would have been better to close this one out. Ego’s Jackson telling Biden, “Well, I was happy to do my part—work twice as hard as a white man my entire life, and then spend a week listening to Ted Cruz call me a pedophile,” spends a few seconds of network airtime holding the worst people in government (or, you know, Earth) up for contempt. (Cecily did her best introducing the thing in a variation of her Jeannine Pirro voice, but even that was a poor person’s Cinema Classics.) (Spoiler: It’s always about hoping someone will sleep with you.) But the tortured logic Kenan gets everyone to reveal at least makes a relatable kind of dumb sense—Fineman’s player scrolled through five years of her ex-boyfriend’s sister’s pictures so that, just maybe, she’d be reminded of how neat Fineman was and remind her brother, leading to “raw-dogging in a Starbucks bathroom.” Gylenhaal, meanwhile, was blindsided by the show’s premise (and, one imagines, the seeming psychic abilities of the buzzer-happy judges), much to in-attendance girlfriend Nwodim’s displeasure. And then there’s Redd, whose commitment to the bit as the most good-to-go flower in the bed just pops. The Best: I’m damning with faint praise here in saying that the choice between the Singers Four and the HGTV home remodeling show came down to a sigh and a shrug. The Rest: I apologize for musing earlier in the season about whether SNL was going to squander Sarah Sherman. Hiring online cult figure “ Sarah Squirm” looked ready to be a waste of weirdness akin to that time Saturday Night Live had no earthly idea what to do with Chris Elliott. Or Tim Robinson. Or Mark McKinney. Or Jenny Slate. Or Natasha Rothwell. Or Bob Odenkirk. Or, you know, a lot of brilliant comic minds too uniquely hilarious for Lorne’s supposedly “edgy” TV empire. But it’s all about Kate’s dead-eyed misery-monster, as she berates feeble son James Austin Johnson for letting Gardner “[steal] your sweetness,” and accusing “Skinny Minnie” Gardner of, for example, wanting a bright and window-walled bathroom so “tuggers and perverts” can watch her “make dirt.” Again, not the sketch of the century, but Kate can imbue a grotesque with startling immediacy. There, he, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, and Bowen Yang reunited to sing their cabaret anthem about finding just enough to admire in yourself to get by, “That’s Enough for Me.” Amidst the supper club banter (“I see some beautiful waters and breads in the crowd”), Cecily’s singer sets the premise by stating, breezily, “Not everyone can be great, some of us are just walking around.” A sketch like this sinks or swims on the specificity behind the one joke, and all singers four found the perfect pitch of low-rent performers’ chutzpah and low-key existential near-despair as they belted out a paean to using up an entire tube of lip balm without losing it, and once meeting a guy from the first season of The Real World. Finding little accomplishments to hang your hat on is all too relatable for depressives and the world-weary (believe me), and the four actors here never waver in asserting that there’s merit in actually making your bed every day, or, as Gyllenhaal’s singer claims, unashamedly and graphically, being able to complete the physical act of love, when the occasion arises.

A new SNL game show, Why'd You Like It, asks contestants to account for the suspicious motives behind their Instagram activity.

They went on to have to answer why they all follow Joe Biden on social media (hint, it's so that they can try and get with someone who is politically minded), and then finally, when Brad starts to yell about how the show changed his social media habits, he likes another post of his "friend". Beth (Chloe Fineman) was trying to use liking an Instagram post from 2017 of her ex-boyfriend's sister as her way of getting back together with him, while Kenny (Chris Redd) was trying to use a like for Megan Thee Stallion's posts to try and get with the famous rapper. Especially for Brad, who has his girlfriend (Ego Nwodim) in the audience.

In another universe, Jake Gyllenhaal could have been an all-time best cast member. A recap of all the sketches from Saturday Night Live's April 9, ...

But in “Dinner with the Dean” and “ Spring Flowers” he displayed how much he commits. (Jake: “Girrrr …” Punkie: “No! Don’t do that voice.”) Ego enters with a Super Soaker (which confuses the audience), but Punkie asks Jake to read conciliatory texts. (Jake: “Girrrl, why we count fish when our love the whole damn ocean?” Melissa: “Oh, Ted, is that really how you feel?”) This sketch is a lot of fun, and Punkie once again shows she can be one of the show’s biggest stars with more opportunities. YEAH HO, WHERE YOU AT?”) Punkie realizes this is the perfect opportunity to practice expressing their emotions and asks Jake to read her texts to her partner and say how he’d respond. The size of the cast just continues to plague the show. I wish SNL had played that more, but instead, the entire sketch was aimless, and they didn’t give Ketanji a point of view other than “happy to be there.” I’m as happy as anybody that she was confirmed, but this was SNL’s weakest cold open of the season. So it was a nice surprise to see Punkie star in the very funny “Couples Counselor” sketch, where Jake and Melissa’s session with Punkie gets interrupted by her unhinged phone calls. The 20th?” Ego: “Nope, just the third.” Keenan: “No further questions, Your Honor.”) We hit a little gold when Punkie comes on as Harriet Tubman. (“What are we doing in the White House? Did we get in trouble?”) Harriet then lets Ketanji know that if she needs help escaping, light two candles. For those who don’t remember, in that monologue, Jake says he told SNL no Brokeback Mountain jokes, only to immediately see Will and Jason dressed as cowboys in the front row. (“Are you thinking about it?”) Everybody is really good here. (Kate: “I bet the book was called Goodnight Cancun.”) SNL opens with James Austin Johnson’s Biden congratulating Ego’s Ketanji Brown Jackson on getting confirmed to the Supreme Court. (Ego: “I bet you can’t say that three times fast.” James: “I’m shocked I could say it one time slow.”) Biden is soon rushed off to a reception, and he tells Ketanji to take her time in the Oval Office. Kate immediately visits her as the Ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Big ol’ YIKES to that one.

SNL's Couples Counselor sketch sees Jake Gyllenhaal and Melissa Villaseñor visit Punkie Johnson's councilor — who has some unusual methods.

This time, however, Johnson asks him to do "the voice." Gyllenhaal begins to say "Giiirrrll," which Johnson quickly shuts down saying "Don't do that voice." Johnson, who is often under utilized on the show, really gets to show off her comedy chops, and will leave you wanting more Johnson every episode.