Ashley Padilla Is Escalating Things

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Online, where comedy fans obsess over Saturday Night Live just like sports fans follow the NFL, Ashley Padilla is quickly becoming a standout star. She’s a frequent topic on podcasts like Saturday Night Network, where people analyze her performance like an athlete. This season, Padilla has appeared in more sketches and had more screen time than anyone else on the cast – an unusual feat for someone in their second year. Fans are tracking her progress online, claiming she’s breaking records for sketch appearances, including tying the record for most sketches in a single episode and reaching 100 total sketch appearances faster than some of her more established colleagues. There’s even buzz about a possible promotion to the main cast, and industry publications are predicting she’ll be an Emmy contender.

When Chloe Troast joined the cast of Saturday Night Live for its 50th season in 2024, she was relatively unknown online. Unlike some of her castmates who had built followings through TikTok or stand-up, she seemed to come out of nowhere. This gave her performances a classic feel, as if she could have seamlessly fit into any era of the show—evoking the styles of past stars like Jane Curtin, Nora Dunn, Ana Gasteyer, and Amy Poehler. She’s not a comedian who relies on catchphrases, but excels at finding humor in simple, perfectly timed line deliveries – even stretching out the pronunciation of ordinary words. While she doesn’t do elaborate physical comedy, she subtly enhances scenes with small details like a twitch, a forced smile, or a well-timed head turn. Throughout her first season, Troast established herself as a performer who plays women completely losing their composure, often channeling the energy of 90s moms reminiscent of actresses like Laura Linney and Joan Cusack – women who seem perfectly at home in a cozy, traditional kitchen.

We met on a windy Monday in mid-January at the Times Square Olive Garden, a well-known Italian restaurant about a ten-minute walk from where Saturday Night Live is filmed. She was wearing a black blazer and pants, trying to go unnoticed, and her hair was neatly styled under a San Francisco Giants baseball cap. She hugged me and jokingly confessed she’d never been to an Olive Garden before – surprising, considering how easily you could imagine one of her characters fitting right in. A server came to our small table near the escalator, away from the windows overlooking bright billboards, and Padilla ordered black coffee. Soon after, we got breadsticks and a whole pot of coffee. I asked her how she was handling her newfound fame from SNL. She laughed and said, “It’s funny you call it ‘breakout.’ I don’t feel that way at all. Last summer, I was just hoping they’d ask me to come back!”

Padilla, 32, grew up in Livermore, California, a small city 45 miles inland from San Francisco. She is the second oldest of four kids raised by a single mother, a former software-company producer whom Padilla describes as artsy, creative, and deeply supportive. (Padilla’s father was not in the picture.) “My mom didn’t go to college, and she worked her way up in a company: Fake it till you make it. Go out there and fucking try it. She proved to herself that you can live like that.” Padilla always considered herself to be funny and enjoyed making her siblings laugh, though she acknowledges that others might have viewed her adolescent talents differently. “I was just the annoying one. I was always doing funny shit, but I think it pissed people off,” she says. “I just remember adults always looking at me like” — she lets out an exasperated sigh and eye roll — “‘Ash-ley.’” In high school, she recalls one teacher exclaiming “I can’t do this today!” at the mere sight of her walking into class. “But he was right,” she admits. “I was a class clown, I was really loud, and I think it was that I just didn’t like anything else. I was bored.”

Looking back, Padilla thinks having an activity like an improv team in high school could have made a difference. She struggled in classes and didn’t have any hobbies she enjoyed. She admits she had very low self-esteem and constantly sought approval from others, which she wasn’t receiving. She says she felt terrible about herself and now wishes she could go back and offer herself some comfort. Around this time, her mother started giving her DVDs of The Office. Padilla credits Steve Carell with being a huge influence, and found it incredibly relatable to see characters acting silly on screen. She was also a big fan of Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. She especially identifies with Ferrell’s comedic style – his ability to get worked up over small things is exactly the type of humor she strives for in her own writing.

Padilla’s comedic strength is clear in one of her most popular SNL sketches, “Surprise.” The sketch, from October 2025, centers around a simple gag: coworkers jump out and yell “Surprise!” causing Padilla’s character to involuntarily fart. While the sound effect was deliberately exaggerated, it was Padilla’s over-the-top reaction that made the sketch go viral. She portrays utter devastation, spending almost 30 seconds repeatedly saying “Oh no, no, no” and cycling through disbelief, anger, and embarrassment. This kind of intense, emotional response is her signature, and it’s helped the sketch gain almost 3 million views on YouTube and nearly 6 million on TikTok.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=watch?v=UI9M_hE_e60

When Padilla was in high school, she didn’t see Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, and Kristen Wiig as people she could aspire to be like professionally. She just thought, “Wow, that’s Michael Scott!” She relates to Greta Gerwig’s experience of initially believing movies just magically appeared—she never considered the people making them. After graduating in 2011, Padilla moved in with her grandmother, briefly attended community college (dropping out after a week), and started working at Sephora. By age 20, after a difficult breakup, she was struggling emotionally. She remembers her mom noticing she was upset and suggesting she try comedy classes, believing it was something Padilla was naturally good at.

Let me tell you about Nicole Padilla’s hustle. Back in 2014, she landed in Los Angeles with big comedy dreams and a seriously tight budget – think $300 a month for a mattress on the floor! She needed to pay the bills, so she took a job at this fun, American-style dim sum place on Sunset, The Church Key, and ended up serving some pretty famous faces, like Tyra Banks and Jon Hamm. Actually, I heard she and Jon Hamm had amazing chemistry during a corporate-style sketch on Season 50 – they’re friends now, along with his wife, which is awesome. She initially tried her hand at improv at Upright Citizens Brigade, but it just didn’t click. She described them as brilliant, but maybe a little too sharp for her at the time. That led her to The Groundlings, the legendary LA school that launched the careers of people like Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and so many others. She fell in love with it, studying there for a full ten years under Tony Sepulveda – you might know him as a casting director from shows like The West Wing and Friends – before finally getting the call to join the cast of Saturday Night Live.

When Padilla was around 22 or 23, she briefly worked at a party at Diane Keaton’s home. She was offered an extra job cleaning up the next day for additional pay, which she happily accepted. This quickly turned into a full-time position, starting with errands and driving Keaton’s son. Padilla recalls being eager to help with anything asked of her. She eventually became Keaton’s assistant, a close friend, and a mentee, working alongside the actress until Padilla joined SNL. Padilla learned a great deal from Keaton, appreciating her humor and vision. Keaton emphasized the importance of self-awareness, knowing exactly what she enjoyed. Keaton clearly liked Padilla, attending her Groundlings performances and even asking her to design and edit her 2024 style book, Fashion First. Despite having no prior experience, Padilla was able to take on the project because Keaton believed in her. “Diane wanted me to succeed,” Padilla explains.

Padilla felt she’d found her community at the Groundlings, a place where being silly and taking risks was encouraged. She describes the school’s Sunday Company, which she joined in 2018, as similar to a mini-Saturday Night Live. For over a year, she and her fellow performers wrote, costumed, and staged their own sketches each week. Many of her ideas, including a character from a memorable SNL audition, originated there. Talent manager Naomi Odenkirk spotted her during a Sunday show, leading to guest appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Night Court, but nothing long-term. After ten years in Los Angeles, Padilla was almost ready to give up when her live sketch show, Party of Three, was selected for the 2024 Netflix Is a Joke festival, directed by Bob Odenkirk. This led to an SNL audition, where Lorne Michaels initially told her they didn’t have an opening. Surprisingly, she received a call shortly after and was offered the job. Even her boss at Keaton seemed to anticipate the news, immediately recognizing Padilla’s impending move to New York when she gave her notice.

Padilla’s start at Saturday Night Live was overwhelming. She admits she was completely lost at first, even confused by basic procedures like table reads and terrified of messing up. Things went from bad to worse when she was unexpectedly told she’d be singing in Spanish, fearing she’d be fired before she even began. Luckily, she quickly connected with writers Alison Gates, Kent Sublette, and Allie Levitan. Together, they created popular sketches like “Surprise,” “Bad Haircut,” and “Mom Confession,” which helped Padilla gain confidence in her comedic style. She shows a collage she made on the wall of the SNL office she shared with Levitan, and a larger one in her current office with Jimmy Fowlie, explaining that Diane taught her to do this. Padilla also created a collage in her West Village apartment, where she spends most of her free time. She describes herself as a homebody, happily sticking to her small neighborhood and local coffee shop.

At the busy Times Square Olive Garden, people come and go at the tables near the windows, which overlook a Hershey’s sign. Padilla describes her first sketch on Saturday Night Live, called “I Got One,” hosted by Bill Burr. In it, she plays a woman hilariously struggling to tell a joke about “four gorgeous dogs.” Her delivery, full of confused language and growing frustration, felt more like something from the comedy show I Think You Should Leave than traditional SNL. (The sketch aired late in the show, in a slot reserved for more experimental comedy.) Padilla recalls that Bill Burr really championed the sketch. During rehearsals, he specifically asked if they were still doing it, which she found incredibly exciting – “It felt amazing that the host even knew who I was!” Like all her best characters, Padilla made this one feel like she was on the verge of something bigger, just out of reach, by fully committing to the character’s distress. “If I don’t fully commit, the joke just falls flat,” she explains. “Everything I do relies on acting, so I have to really stick with it. Otherwise, it doesn’t work at all.”

Padilla doesn’t want people to keep talking about the show as a super-stressful, high-pressure environment. When asked what’s the hardest part of being on the show, she pauses to refill her coffee. “Honestly, I don’t think there is one,” she says. “I get paid to do comedy, I work with incredibly funny people, we have a dedicated writing space, and we get to perform on television week after week.” She describes it all with the enthusiasm of someone in a job interview who claims their biggest flaw is being too passionate. She looks me in the eye and then laughs, admitting, “I’m serious. What could I possibly complain about? If anything, I wish we had more time – I’m always overflowing with ideas and I wish we could make a hundred episodes!”

We finally finished off our huge pot of Olive Garden coffee – surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad – and that meant it was time for Sarah Padilla to get back to work. She has a lot on her plate this season on Saturday Night Live. With Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim leaving, the show now has twice as many male cast members as female ones, and only one of the five new hires this season was a woman. This often means Padilla is assigned roles like wives and mothers, and sometimes even playing the parent of actors who are older than she is. She jokes, “Need a mom for your sketch? I’ll plead with you to let me play the part!” But she’s especially proud of the characters she developed at the Groundlings improv group that she’s been able to bring to the show. After months of getting rejected, her character “Bad Haircut” woman finally made it on air in November. In the sketch, Padilla enthusiastically defends a terrible haircut (“I like it!” she says in a telltale, high-pitched voice that reveals she’s not being truthful), but she barely manages to convince even herself.

She’s aiming to create a memorable, recurring character on Saturday Night Live, similar to past favorites like Domingo or Lisa from Temecula – that’s her big goal. She moved closer to achieving this in February with a second appearance on “Weekend Update,” playing one half of a hilariously awkward couple. Beyond SNL, she also wants to make movies, feeling that sketches don’t allow enough time to fully develop characters. She’s currently working with a producer and revising a screenplay she wrote last summer. The movie, a comedy about women striving for success, features a mostly female cast – she jokes there might only be one male character. It’s about people pursuing their goals in a really funny, and often foolish, way.

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2026-03-02 18:59