Saturday Night Live comedian Bowen Yang has voiced his support for Aimee Lou Wood after the White Lotus star hit out at the show’s “mean” parody.
In the skit, cast member Sarah Sherman put on a British accent (Wood used her own Mancunian accent in The White Lotus) and wore exaggerated prosthetic teeth in an attempt to mimic Wood’s appearance.
In a post shared on her Instagram story after the episode aired, Wood, 31, called the sketch “unfunny and mean”. She later revealed she had received an apology from SNL.
“However she reacted to that sketch is completely valid,” Yang told Extra. “With parody, you kind of forget the sort of human, emotional cost that it sort of extols on someone.”
He added: “Everyone at SNL is just a fan of the show, obviously a fan of her. We just think that she should be so proud of the work that she put into the season, it was just water cooler television again that we desperately have a craving for.
“So I feel like it’s this thing that we tend to forget sometimes and this is a reminder and it seems like she has spoken to people at the show about it and hopefully there’s room to sort of move on from it.”
He went on to say that the experience has served as a much-needed reminder for the show.
“But yeah, you need those reminders every now and then that parody can go too far sometimes and that we, as comedians, can take account for that instead of banging our foot and saying that we should be able to say whatever we want. That’s just culture, it’s not PC or woke culture, it’s just culture,” said the Wicked star.
During the episode, which aired on 12 April, SNL cast members reimagined the hit HBO series as The White Potus. The sketch depicted Donald Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) attempting to unwind at an exotic vacation resort with Ivanka Trump (Scarlett Johansson) and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (Jon Gries), while secretly panicking about the future financial state of America due to its tariff policy chaos.
The SNL skit also attempted to recreate the dynamic between Rick (Walton Goggins) and his younger girlfriend Chelsea (Wood), with RFK Jr (Jonn Hamm) rambling about fluoride in water to his confused girlfriend who darts off to kill and eat a monkey.
