Saturday Night Live opened its May 9 episode with a cold open set in a bar in Washington, D.C., and Matt Damon was back in the role of Brett Kavanaugh. Colin Jost played Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Aziz Ansari appeared as FBI Director Kash Patel, and the sketch sent up a Supreme Court-era cast of characters with a line about a third Trump term.
“We’re going to let Trump do a third term,” Damon’s Kavanaugh said in the sketch, only for Donald Trump to pop in with a “Psych!” The bit also had Hegseth bragging that he “started a war,” while Kavanaugh declared, “Your body, my choice!” and dismissed the room with “Wrong!” as the scene turned from politics into a drinking joke in a crowded bar.
The sketch mattered because it put Damon back at the center of SNL’s political satire after he first spoofed Kavanaugh in 2018 during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing parody. It also marked his first time hosting the show since 2018, and his third time overall as host, with Noah Kahan serving as musical guest on the May 9 episode.
That return carried extra weight because the show has recently leaned on James Austin Johnson’s Trump in its cold opens, and the May 9 segment was the second straight one not to feature him. The week before, on May 2, Aziz Ansari debuted his Kash Patel impersonation in the opening sketch, a casting move that carried into this episode and kept the political spoof rotating through a smaller set of faces. For a separate look at Ansari’s Patel turn, see this report.
Damon also used his monologue to nod to the show’s familiar Mother’s Day weekend tradition of bringing cast members’ mothers onstage, saying “SNL” usually flies them in first class, but that this year “Spirit Airlines shut down,” so “it ain’t happening tonight.” He added that he had a new movie coming out, “The Odyssey,” which he said would not arrive “this weekend, not next weekend, but nine weekends from now.” The film is scheduled to open July 17.
The setup gave the episode a familiar SNL rhythm, but the pivot away from Johnson’s Trump and the return of Damon’s Kavanaugh made the cold open feel less like routine political filler and more like a reset. The show answered its own question by choosing nostalgia, a new Patel impression and a pointed barroom send-up over another round of Trump.
