How Ashley Padilla Became SNL’s Latest Breakout Star - Time Magazine

Ashley Padilla had heard the stories: Saturday Night Live is a competitive workplace, a “shark tank.” But to hear her tell it, the job is pretty much sunshine and rainbows, save for some sleep deprivation. “I find it so collaborative and fun,” she says. “Everyone’s just trying to make people laugh—it can’t be too serious.” 

This story is part of the 2026 TIME100 Next. Read Bob Odenkirk’s tribute to Ashley Padilla here.

Of course it helps when, just two seasons in, you’re widely hailed as the show’s latest breakout star. Padilla, 33, made her debut during SNL’s 50th season, and quickly distinguished herself by bringing a sense of realism to even her most absurd performances. In season 51, she logged more screen time than any other cast member and reached the 100-sketches milestone in just 28 episodes. 

Padilla started her third season on Sept. 26 with a headline-making impression of White House aide Natalie Harp, doe-eyed and obsessed with President Trump. Her focus for the months ahead is clear. “I always feel—not pressure—I'm just always motivated to top myself every week,” says Padilla, who was promoted this season from featured player to repertory cast member. “So if that stays in me, which I think it will, the rest is out of my hands.” 

Padilla is as much a writer as she is a performer. At the Groundlings, the famed Los Angeles improv troupe that served as training ground for Will Ferrell, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Lisa Kudrow, and many others, she had to write her own material if she wanted to get onstage. She brought that muscle with her to 30 Rock. She works closely with head writers Alison Gates and Kent Sublette on all her sketches, but many of her best, most viral moments from the past two seasons are ones that started in her own brain. In “Haircut,” with host Glen Powell, she plays a woman who is desperately trying to convince her friends (and herself) that she likes her horrific new haircut. The inspiration came from the time she shaved her head because she thought it was a necessary first step toward a sleek, Zoë Kravitz-style pixie.

For “Kathy,” with host Jack Black, she adapted a character she conceived at the Groundlings, creating an office menace with zero self-awareness who asks her lunchroom companions the same questions over and over as they struggle to ignore her. “We talkin’ TV?” Kathy asks, trying to wedge her way into a conversation about Survivor. Padilla says Kathy is her favorite SNL character so far. “I want to bring Kathy on Love Island,” she jokes. “I want them to let Kathy go on Love Island in a swimsuit, and when everyone's talking, I say, ‘We talkin’ flirting?’ And I want people to have to ignore me, and I keep not getting voted out.” Of all the wigs Padilla has donned in her 100-plus sketches, Kathy’s frizzy, light brown mop is a favorite, too.

Padilla has an old-school quality, both on the show and off. Unlike so many new and up-and-coming performers today, she is allergic to social media—her Instagram profile offers the bare minimum, obligatory promotional posts. She’s not the kind of entertainer who will share who she’s dating or what she ate for breakfast, or be photographed at the hottest club in New York right now. Padilla’s relative anonymity allows her to disappear into the characters she plays in her sketches in a way that comedians who lead with their own bombastic personalities cannot. On SNL, she has been hailed as both a natural and an invigorating force.

In the much-lauded sketch “Surprise,” with Sabrina Carpenter, Padilla plays a woman who treats her workplace fart as an existential catastrophe, lingering in wordless misery as her coworkers stare, aghast, until the moment becomes surreal. Her performance made the overplayed trope of the fart joke feel new, and prompted the New York Times to publish a piece about her use of extended silences, dubbing her technique “the Padilla Pause.” She deployed it in “Mom Confession,” where she plays a mother who’s telling her family, in a drawn-out, indulgent manner, that she regrets voting for President Trump. Getting the timing right for these moments is not easy: Padilla says she’s cut off a silence too quickly, and also held one too long, edging into ham territory. The most successful of these pauses come from listening to the audience and working with them. “It’s vulnerable to sit in that dead air,” she says, “and I love it.”

The throughline for the characters Padilla is drawn to, as she sees it, is the comedy of trying to maintain an image of perfection. “My sense of humor is very stupid. I like being the idiot. I like being a person who’s flubbed and then takes it too seriously,” she says. What makes those efforts to keep it together so funny: “It’s implying that we are not flawed.”

One of four kids raised by a single mother in the San Francisco Bay Area, Padilla swears that she’s the least funny of all her siblings. “Life can be really hard and I think my family is very good at finding the sense of humor in things, so I was sort of raised that way,” she says. School never appealed to her, and she lasted a week at a local community college before dropping out, then worked at Sephora and as a hair-and-makeup artist for weddings and events. After a bad breakup, she was down in the dumps, and her mom made a suggestion: try comedy.

Padilla moved to Los Angeles and spent 10 years pursuing comedy, performing with the Groundlings and auditioning for roles and commercials. Somewhere along the way, a coffee date with her mom’s friend’s sister, who worked for Diane Keaton, led to a job assisting the legendary actor. Padilla started by running errands, then took on bigger responsibilities like managing her social media and eventually working with her on a coffee-table book called Fashion First. Keaton would come to Padilla’s Groundlings performances and cheer her on. “When I think of her, especially in her passing, everybody feels such a connection with her and that's why—because she just spread so much joy and love,” Padilla says.

Keaton once advised Padilla to believe in herself enough to not have a plan B, but the young performer eventually reached a point where she wanted to quit. She’d risen as high as she could at the Groundlings, and though she loved it, she didn’t want to keep sending audition tapes into the void. “I did not find it fun,” she says. “It’s just so much rejection.” Her manager, Naomi Odenkirk (who is married to comedian and actor Bob Odenkirk), suggested one last thing, a showcase of her best material from throughout the years. With two friends, Padilla put on an hour-long live show, Party of Three. The show got Netflix’s attention and was selected for its Netflix Is a Joke festival in 2024. 

Then came the call: SNL wanted to see her. Four days after learning she’d been cast, Padilla moved across the country to New York to start the job. Looking back, she sees those years of striving as preparation for what was to come. By the time her big break came, she arrived fully formed. “Had I gotten this job maybe a little younger for myself, I don't think I would've felt as comfortable,” she says. It was those years of making mistakes onstage—dropping props, flubbing lines, crashing and burning with bad jokes—that have allowed her to step out onto the SNL stage and stay in the moment. “Everything works out how it's supposed to.” 

Padilla swears that her life outside of Studio 8H is “boring.” She doesn’t drink. She FaceTimes with her family and plays video games with her nephew. She watches reality TV. “I party by being alone at home and making Pinterest boards or writing stuff,” she says.

During SNL’s summer hiatus, Padilla shot The Catch, a romcom starring Emma Stone and Chris Pine in which she plays Stone’s sister. Movies are top of mind for Padilla, who is also working with Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins’ production company Pastel on a female-driven horror comedy she wrote. For Padilla, film offers a chance to follow in the footsteps of multihyphenates she admires, like Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, and Zach Cregger, creatives who “wrote their way and performed and directed and made their vision come to life,” she says. “I want to direct, and I want to make things. And that excites me, that jump.”

She recalls something Keaton always used to say: “Funny is money.” She repeats it to herself all the time. “It’s gold,” Padilla says. “We want to laugh.”

Art Direction and Set Art by Jana Frost for TIME; Photography by Stefano Giuliano for TIME; Hair by Joseph Maine at A-Frame Agency; Makeup by Andrea Ventura at The Only Agency; Styling by Tom Broecker; Cover: Wolford tights, Stuart Weitzman boots; Comedy and Tragedy Masks look: Cecilia Bahnsen dress, Thom Browne shirt and tie, Sportmax shoes, Albright Fashion Library; Skull look: Tanner Fletcher shirt, Vivianne Westwood corset, Nina Ricci pants, Celine shoes, Albright Fashion Library; Staircase look: Aknvas dress, Wolford tights, Lanvin shoes, vintage YSL pin.