This week on the SNL Hall of Fame podcast we welcome back to the show, Kirstin Rajala to discuss and build a case for Beck Bennett.

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[0:42 ] Thank you so much, Doug DeNance. It is a thrill to be back here in the SNL Hall of Fame, bringing to you the SNL Hall of Fame podcast. Once again, we're back for season six. We really hope you enjoyed the draft episode. Now, why don't you come inside? You might notice I'm looking at your feet. Wipe them. Know what I'm saying? So there's that. The SNL Hall of Fame podcast is a weekly affair fair where each episode we take a deep dive into the career of a former cast member, host, musical guest, or writer and add them to the ballot for your consideration.

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[1:20 ] Once the nominees have been announced, we turn to you, the listener, to vote for the most deserving and help determine who will be enshrined for perpetuity in the hall. And that's how we play the game. It's just that simple. I am so pumped to be working with Matt and Thomas again for another season. We've got a banger of a year. We've got some fantastic, fantastic nominees and some really amazing special guests this season to nominate those nominees and build the case for them. We're also doing something a little different this year. We've got a new sister show that will be released on Thursdays or Fridays. I'm still flirting with that. If you have a preference, whether it's Thursdays or Fridays, send me an email, the SNL hall of fame at gmail.com. That's right. It's a new email address because it's a new year. It's a new season and we need a new email address. So there's that. Now, I will say that the SNL Water Cooler will be a visitation, a revisitation of the week's episode, and it'll also take a look at the episode of SNL, whether or not there are Hall-worthy performances or Hall-of-Shame-worthy performances that we might analyze down the road when we nominate so-and-so.

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[2:47 ] So there's that. What do you say we wander down the hall and talk to our good friend Matt Ardill? I am going to pivot and make my way down the corridor here. Ah, there he is, leaning against the wall like a slug. Hey, if you got time to lean, you got time to clean, my boy.

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[3:06 ] Matt, you've been around for four seasons, five seasons at this point. This is the beginning of your fifth season. How are you doing, man? Good, good. I'm happy to be here. And how about you, J.D.? I am pretty much good. I was camping, and I've been eaten alive. My ankles are all itchy, but other than that, I cannot complain. Yeah, but you got some fresh air, got out of the city, so that's always good. That's right.

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[3:33 ] So what do you got for us this week? Today, I have Beck Bennett. Nice. Five foot eight, born on the best day of the year in Willamette, Illinois. Shares a birthday with luminaries such as Julie Andrews, Jimmy Carter, and myself. Hey. October 1st, 1984, which makes me feel all the more useless because he's 10 years my junior and has achieved so much more than I have. Oh, stop. Stop. Yeah, no, but he grew up a theater kid performing in children's theater at the Children's Theater of Winnetka. And in high school, played Jean Valjean at the New Tierra High School performance of Les Miserables. Yeah. So, now, he did go on to attend University of Southern California and the USC School of Dramatic Arts. Where he met and formed the sketch troupe Good Neighbor with Kyle Mooney, Nick Rutherford, and Dave McCary, all of whom went on to work at SNL.

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[4:39 ] Now, after joining Good Neighbor, they created a series of sketch comedy shorts on YouTube which uh kind of make the parodies that they did later on in snl all the funnier um but this led to a series of ads where he's the at&t guy uh that uh had him interviewing children in a mock political talk show that's right yeah yeah uh and now that went on to become 84 acting credits seven writing credits eight producing credits four soundtrack credits including possibly the only person who can adequately capture the wonder that is launchpad mcquack on the ducktales reboot um now if anybody could do a live action ducktales that would be him i would love to see uh actually a darkwing duck reboot and bring back beck as launchpad but uh not you can only dream yeah yeah well you know disney plus is going to need to mine that content eventually um but yeah so he went on to marry jesse hodges another actor and they have a child together born march of 2022.

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[6:03 ] Well, I definitely miss him on SNL. Yeah. He was somebody that became, like really grew into his role, I felt. And I really enjoyed him. And I also enjoy our friend Thomas Senna, who is in the conversation room with Kirsten Rajula right now, getting ready to teach us more about Beck Bennett. Matt, are you ready for that? I am looking forward to it. Well, let's get right to it.

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[7:00 ] Alright, JD, Matt, thank you so much. Hey guys, welcome to another season of the SNL Hall of Fame podcast. I am joined today by, like, we had to kick off the season of discussions with just, like, an all-timer guest. So we're talking about all-timer nominees. Every week we talk about all-timer, you know, people from SNL history.

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[7:25 ] I had to kick it off this week with an all-timer guest. So joining me for the first discussion of Season 6 for our first nominee is the one, the only, the lovely world traveler, Kristen Rahula. How's it going, Kirsten? It's great. What an intro. Thank you very much. And I didn't know this was the first. Oh my gosh. It's lovely to see your face and hear your voice. Yes, I've been traveling, and yes, I'm excited to be talking about SNL once again with some of my favorite people, the other super fans. And this episode is going to be great because we are talking about someone truly, truly deserving and who is so much fun to talk about because they are in everything. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Like ubiquitous right there with, of course, Beck Bennett, who's our nominee to kick off season six of the SNL Hall of Fame. Kirsten, so I like to do the plugs at the top of the discussion, the way this is formatted. So do you have anything? What's going on in Kirsten's world lately? Well, for people in the Toronto area, my bestie and I do an event series, and it's intergenerational storytelling, female voices. So if you're in the Toronto area, it's generationwomen.ca. Please come and listen to women of all ages tell beautiful stories. It's a really fun event, and we would love the support.

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[8:54 ] Yes, that sounds awesome. Yeah, go check that out. Also, listen to Kirsten. You're probably going to be a panelist, I assume, for Saturday Night Network's coverage on Season 50? Heck yeah. Yeah, check us out on the Saturday Night Network, where we also cover all things SNL with an even larger group of superfans. That is also a fun one, so check that out. They have shows multiple times throughout the week. Yeah, yeah. I love hearing Kirsten pop up, whether it's a hot take show or the roundtables. Yeah, I love hearing Kirsten pop up. So check her out on the Saturday Night Network. But today we were chatting about our first nominee for season six. That's the one, the only Mr. Beck Bennett. So a little bit of the CliffsNotes here before we kind of get a dig into Beck's SNL time. When he was a freshman in college, he met Kyle Mooney. They started doing sketch and improv together. It was at USC. They were part of Good Neighbor, along with Nick Rutherford and Dave McCary, Mr. Emma Stone himself, Dave McCary. Beck was in a run of AT&T commercials in which he interviewed children. Do you remember these, Kirsten?

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[10:13 ] No, because I'm in Canada. I was wondering. That's why I asked. I don't know what kind of TV y'all get up there. They don't have AT&T, so yeah, I wouldn't have seen it. But I'm going to look them up. Okay, yeah, so it was a series of commercials. He sat there. It was like a circle of children. He would ask them different questions, I think pertaining to phone service or something like that. So that's where I knew Beck. So when he got on SNL, I was like, oh, there's that guy from the phone commercials. That's crazy. He does sketch comedy. Okay, let's see what this is about. out uh so yeah yeah you need to go youtube some of those at&t commercials and you'll see beck put on his his commanding voice like like like he liked to do on the show um so he was making a nice career for himself when he got the call so september of 2013 he began his snl tenure along with his good neighbor cohorts along with kyle mooney debuted uh right then too so kirsten like what were any initial impressions you may have had uh of beck bennett when he first kind of got on your radar. What'd you think of him?

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[11:17 ] He's one of those people, it's a little hard to separate all of the characters he plays with who I imagine he is in real life. I picture him as the kind of failure-to-launch jock at your high school read. But I know he's probably not. He's wonderful, I'm sure, and a very smart, smart man, because clearly someone has got to be intelligent to pull off the kind of nuance and range that he does. But it's fun to think of him as that man-child that he always was, bit of a douche, often befuddled, making the wrong choices. Like you love him but you're like shaking your head so he at the beginning kind of very quickly started to establish himself as like fitting into those slots you saw him play a dumb kind of doofus dad typical middle-aged white guy and he did all of those things with enthusiasm so.

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[12:12 ] While some people start off kind of awkward and they're trying