‘SNL’: Maya Rudolph’s Beyoncé Returns to ‘Hot Ones,’ Does Not Slay
Maya Rudolph returned to Saturday Night Live as host on the latest episode, and the former cast member reprising one of her most beloved sketches: Impersonating Beyoncé as guest on the chicken wing-eating YouTube interview series Hot Ones.
The original sketch aired back in 2021 when Rudolph served as guest host, with “Beyoncé” memorably wilting under the heat of the chicken wings. “This is the only thing that I attempted that I did not slay, and that bothered both me and my husband, my husband is Jay Z,” Rudolph’s Beyoncé — in Cowboy Carter attire — tells Mikey Day’s host Sean Evans.
Things start off better this go-round, with “Beyoncé” handling both the first wing and the first question about the inspiration behind Cowboy Carter. “I just thought who gets to define country music, why not me?” she said. “This is a tasty wing, not that spicy. I’m from Texas baby, your girl likes it caliente. Let’s do the next one.”
However, over the course of the next few sauces — “Satan’s Taint Charred Chili,” “Sergeant Sphincter’s Volcanopeno,” and a nameless sauce that’s a picture of a toilet bowl on fire — things go awry as Rudolph’s Beyoncé soon struggles to answer questions.
“This wing is stomping my ass. Damn, my bones are hot,” she says before speaking in tongues.
Amid inquiries about “Ya Ya” and Act III of her album trilogy, Rudolph’s Beyoncé lashes out as Evans, “You need to shut your Charlie Brown-looking mouth and listen to me… You need to kill yourself, Gollum. You just gave the world’s baddest bitch swamp ass on YouTube.”
Like the last Hot Ones sketch — where Beyoncé’s manager demanded that all footage be destroyed — the latest episode ends abruptly as her assistant uses one of those Men in Black memory-wiping devices and tells Evans, “Beyoncé was never here.”
During her SNL tenure, Rudolph portrayed Beyoncé in numerous sketches, including in 2012 where other musicians visited her and Jay Pharoah’s Jay-Z following the birth of Blue Ivy: