Prior to the premiere of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th season, everyone knew that Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris would be back in the picture. Rudolph first played Harris during the 2019 Democratic primary, and now that Harris is running for president, it only made sense to bring Rudolph back.
Harris’s campaign has also introduced some new figures to national politics, though, that didn’t already have any SNL casting decisions attached to them. In the premiere of the show’s 50th season, we got to see who would be playing those folks through the 2024 campaign. Jim Gaffigan will be playing Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, and Andy Samberg also returned to the show to play Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.
The show’s first sketch also revealed that, while cast member James Austin Johnson would continue playing Trump, Bowen Yang will be playing Trump’s running mate, JD Vance.
Perhaps the most notable new casting, though, was Dana Carvey’s return to the show to play Joe Biden. Biden has been one of the toughest roles for SNL to crack in recent years, with Jason Sudeikis, Woody Harrelson, John Mulaney, Jim Carrey, Alex Moffat, James Austin Johnson, and Mikey Day all trying their versions of the current president. Carvey has not hosted the show since 2011, but has remained in the family and appeared twice in 2016 to reprise his famed “church lady” character.
It’s unclear how many of these actors will appear in their characters weekly. There’s only a few weeks until the election, though, so some of them might not need to be in their roles for long.
