It’s a cool Thursday morning in New York City when Ashley Padilla joins our Zoom call, appearing on-screen in a cozy heather gray quarter zip, her freshly bobbed auburn hair tucked neatly behind her ears. There are just over 48 hours to go before she and the rest of the Saturday Night Live cast film the November 16 episode, hosted by Glen Powell.
Padilla, 32, is a featured player on SNL, and still something of a rookie, having just kicked off her second season. So when I clock the cylinder she’s clutching against her palm with her thumb, I assume it’s a vape pen, a discreet outlet for a comedian working one of the most notoriously demanding jobs in the industry. When she gesticulates, which is often, I catch flashes of the tube, a blur of gray plastic in motion.
Twenty minutes have passed, however, when I realize it’s not a vape at all.
“Are you holding a…Rhode lip balm?” I ask.
She looks at her hand as though to see for herself. “Oh, my God, I am,” she says, laughing. Her cheerful sitcom-mom smile fills the screen as she explains her codependent relationship with the stuff. “I do this even at table [reads],” she says. “I do it on Zooms. I found out later, people were like, ‘Are you vaping?’”
When I confess that I, too, mistook the lip balm for a vape, she feigns disgust at the idea. “I need to throw this thing across the room!” she yells in her soon-to-be-signature warble. “I just thought of all the meetings I’ve done on Zoom, and people [must be] like, ‘Yeah, she hits a vape.’”
With mock seriousness, she sits up a little straighter and looks at the camera: “Everyone,” she says, using the same quasi-professional tone she’ll later deploy while parodying White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during the show’s cold open, “It is Rhode lip balm, and it’s addicting.”
Padilla joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as a featured player during season 50, alongside newcomers Emil Wakim (who was let go after one season) and Jane Wickline. Four episodes into season 51, however, and it was clear that Padilla was more than capable of stepping into the spotlight after several season 50 departures. Two sketches in particular, “Surprise” and “Two People Who Just Hooked Up Discuss the Government Shutdown,” have earned her particular praise, with Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy remarking that Padilla’s “everywoman exterior conceals the beating heart of a freak.” (In comedy, that’s praise of the highest caliber.)