9/19/2023 0 Comments Snl video shorts by episode![]() ![]() The first "Laser Cats!" short was still weeks away. " Lazy Sunday," the breakthrough short wherein Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell hardcore-rapped about their affinity for The Chronicles of Narnia and New York's Magnolia bakery, had premiered less than three months earlier. SNL's Digital Shorts, which would come to define Saturday Night Live for a period of time, were still in their infancy at that moment. And then, a couple sketches after Weekend Update, came the digital short. From there, Portman was put through the paces of some of the usual mid-Aughts SNL fare: a fairly funny Jamba Juice sketch, a pretty irritating Nuni sketch, a timely impersonation of Winter Olympics figure skater Sasha Cohen. This was Portman's first go as an SNL host, and right from the beginning - with a monologue in which she got to school some pretend Star Wars fans on the finer points of Jango Fett and the planet Kashyyyk - the efforts to both acknowledge Star Wars while moving past it were evident. V for Vendetta, a dark action-thriller based on the graphic novel of the same name, was another project that would help push Padme Amidala further into her rearview. She had a breakout year in 2004, with an acclaimed performance in the indie hit Garden State, and in the sexually frank Mike Nichols-directed Closer, which earned her both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. By the time the third Star Wars film came out, Portman was already selecting projects to set herself apart. It allowed her to transition out of the child-star era that she'd occupied for the latter half of the '90s and gave her some box-office bona fides (as well as, one imagines, a rather healthy bank balance), but the poor reception for the prequels didn't do a ton for her reputation as an actress. The prequel trilogy had cbeen something of a mixed blessing for Portman's career. Portman was promoting her performance in the Wachowskis-produced V for Vendetta the movie, for which she'd shaved her head almost immediately after making her final Star Wars film. The March 4, 2006, episode of Saturday Night Live featured Portman as the host with musical guest Fall Out Boy, if you want to triangulate its location on the pop culture timeline. But back in 2006, Portman's rap was just a short post-Weekend Update oddity that sent up actresses' attempts to shed their once-innocent images, which happened to allow Portman to shed some of her own career baggage in the process. A decade and a half later, it's been about 30 films, one husband, two kids, and an Academy Award for Portman, and countless viral digital shorts for SNL. ![]() It was fifteen years ago this week that Natalie Portman busted out an over-the-top, profanely aggressive rap in an SNL digital short that went viral in the earliest days of YouTube, making us all wonder just how much weed she'd actually smoked at Harvard. ![]()
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