Few Saturday Night Live sketches from last season were as celebrated and pored over as the brilliantly dumb “Beavis and Butt-Head” bit, in which Ryan Gosling and Mikey Day attended a boring talk show on artificial intelligence as the famous Mike Judge cartoon characters. Gosling and Day looked so insane that not even Heidi Gardner — who was playing the moderator — could keep herself from laughing, setting off a chain reaction of breaking onstage.
That sketch wouldn’t have been possible without two key behind-the-scenes figures — hair stylist Jodi Mancuso and makeup artist Louie Zakarian. And the pair have now shared their experiences of the sketch, as well as a bit of backstory, in a new interview on The Ankler.
Mancuso and Zakarian noted that the idea for the “Beavis and Butt-Head” sketch had been marinating for several years, going all the way back to a 2018 episode that Jonah Hill was set to host. But Mancuso said the skit didn’t make it to air in part because she “wasn’t fully happy with the wigs.” A second attempt also fell short, because the hair just wasn’t hitting.
“So we fully gave up on it,” Mancuso said, “this is not going to happen.”
When the sketch eventually came back around, Mancuso was determined to get the wig right even though Day and SNL writer Streeter Seidell “wanted the same exact wigs as the first time.” She continued: “I disagreed with them and told them that I’m not doing it like that. We need to make them a little more human. Streeter was against it the whole time, and I said, too bad, I’m going to trust myself on this one.”
Zakarian also made some tweaks to the bonkers mouthpiece that Day wore, saying, “I made this crazy little bridge that goes into his mouth, and the first time it didn’t lift his lip up enough. This time I went in and redid it and made it a little more prominent and made it pop a little more. Just having his lip have those braces and those teeth exposed, it really did help.”
The pair went on to discuss Gardner breaking and cut the comedian some slack, considering, even at dress rehearsal, she hadn’t seen Day and Gosling in their full Beavis and Butt-Head getups. “Mikey didn’t really have the bald cap on,” Mancuso said. “She saw it, she kind of had an idea, but it wasn’t full.”
Zakarian added, “Even at dress rehearsal, I think he was only like 85 percent there. I tweaked the makeup a little bit, I think Jodi moved the wig back a little bit on him. For air, it was dead on.”
