Skip to main content

SNL shows hilarious disaster of A-listers in Star Wars audition

Star Wars Auditions - SNL
Imagine what it would be like to take a look at the many actors who screen tested for the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens revival. Director J.J. Abrams appeared on this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night live, hosted by Matthew McConaughey, to bring viewers some extremely rare, unseen outtakes.

In the hilarious sketch, we see a mix of real actors, like Emma Stone and Jon Hamm, give their interpretations of famous characters (the latter auditions for “Hamm Solo,” and notes that he’s written some of his own stuff) along with a stream of spot-on impressions from cast members. Cecily Strong is a dead vocal ringer for bombshell Sofia Vergara, seemingly thinking she’s auditioning for the Minions movie. Jay Pharoah does his interpretation of Shaquille O’Neal as Chewbacca, and Taran Killam as a too-sexy David Beckham who proceeds to “bend it” and kick the soccer ball-esque BB-8 across the room.

Related: Google promises Force Awakens goodies if you decide between the light or the dark side

To make it even more, er, believable, actors from the real film were there to screen test with them, including Daisy Ridley (who plays Rey in the film) and John Boyega (the Storm Trooper Finn). Boyega laughs it up as he peers at the script that suggests there being a black Storm Trooper.

Keep an eye out for Bobby Moynihan’s hilarious take on George Lucas, who’s lurking in the background, upset that no one can find him a Coke Zero. He also plays Danny DeVito auditioning for the part of BB-8. Newest cast member Leslie Jones ends the segment with her typical angry scream when she comes in decked out as a Klingon to audition for Star Trek by accident. Er, wrong iconic film franchise, Leslie.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens in theaters on December 18. Along with Ridley and Boyega, it stars Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill (allegedly), and Adam Driver, among others.

Check out the full SNL clip above.

Editors' Recommendations

Christine Persaud
Christine has decades of experience in trade and consumer journalism. While she started her career writing exclusively about…
The best female Star Wars characters, ranked
Rosario Dawson in The Mandalorian.

Although it's gotten better in recent years, the world of Star Wars has been traditionally dominated by men. Men have, for the most part, been the main characters of these stories, and, stereotypically at least, been the biggest fans of the franchise. All along, though, Star Wars has had compelling female characters that were well worth rooting for or vilifying.

While the full list of important female Star Wars characters is quite long, we've narrowed this list down to the nine who are the most pivotal in franchise history and ranked them.
9. Asajj Ventress

Read more
All the canceled Star Wars movies
Rey Finn Poe Chewie and C-3PO in the desert in "Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker."

These days, Star Wars is just getting more and more projects. While the franchise continues to expand with shows on Disney+, there hasn't been a new movie made since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. Given that Disney spent a while figuring out what it wanted to do with the iconic sci-fi property, many films had been announced, only for most of them to get blasted off the company calendar.

But with three new films confirmed to be on the horizon, now is the time to catch up on all the Star Wars films that never came to be.
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

Read more
Star Trek vs. Star Wars: which one is better in 2023?
Diego Luna walks through a scrapyard of ships in a scene from Andor.

For as long as both entities have existed, fans of science fiction and fantasy have debated the merits of Star Trek and Star Wars. But for most of the 45 years that the two franchises have overlapped, Star Trek and Star Wars haven’t actually had much in common, apart from their cosmic setting. Star Trek is an aspirational sci-fi series set in humanity’s future, while Star Wars is a bombastic fantasy adventure that takes place in a far-off galaxy. One has primarily lived on weekly television, while the other has broken big-screen box office numbers.
However, in recent years, both Star Trek and Star Wars have become tentpoles for their parent companies’ subscription streaming services, Paramount+ and Disney+, respectively, each pumping out a steady stream of content in an ever-widening array of formats. This has led them to encroach further into each other’s territory than ever before. Star Trek vs. Star Wars is no longer an apples-to-oranges comparison — they are directly competing products, sharing some of the same ambitions and struggling against the same environmental forces.
We will likely never settle on which space franchise is the greatest of all time, but we can take a moment to ask: Which is better right now?

Star Trek and Star Wars have both leaned heavily into fan service

Read more