Amy Adams spent Friday’s Late Night with Seth Meyers explaining, with the slight half-smile she has been bringing to talk-show couches since the Enchanted press tour, why a now-famous Saturday Night Live sketch never quite made it to dress rehearsal in 2008. She had vetoed it, she told Meyers, because the pitch came from Andy Samberg, the bit was graphic, and she was 33 hours into being the public face of Disney’s just-launched fairy-tale franchise.
“I was just so keenly aware of all the young girls that were watching Enchanted,” Adams said, sitting in front of a backdrop the show producers have not changed since 2021. Meyers, who was the SNL head writer the year of Adams’s host stint, narrated the rest of the pitch from his own memory, telling viewers that Samberg had walked the idea into the writers’ room with a confidence Lorne Michaels had been hesitant to fold into Adams’s broadcast. Variety reported the specific sketch was an extended digital short in the vein of Samberg’s Lonely Island work, with Adams playing a fairy-tale-coded character against a deliberately gratuitous setup.
The moment landed because of the franchise math around it. Enchanted had opened to $34 million in November 2007 and was still in second-run theaters in March 2008, the week of Adams’s host stint, on its way to a global $341 million close. Disney’s marketing team was rolling Giselle’s image across Burger King kids meals, school-day lunchboxes and a Disney on Ice tour that was specifically pitched to four-to-eight-year-olds. “It was the wrong week for that sketch,” Adams told Meyers. “For anyone, but really for me.”
The host slot is now framed retrospectively as one of the better-received first-time SNL bookings of the Lorne Michaels late-2000s era, and the choice to scrap the Samberg pitch did not noticeably affect Adams’s relationship with the show’s writers room. She has since hosted the Christmas episode of SNL’s 2014 season, returned as a guest in two cold opens during the Trump era, and lent her voice to Meyers’s bit-character ensemble over the past two years.
Samberg, for his part, has acknowledged the moment in podcast appearances since 2018, framing it as an early lesson in how the late-night incubator handles its child-audience-adjacent talent. Lonely Island producers Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone have separately credited Adams’s veto for sharpening their work on the digital-short format, the genre that would shortly produce “Dick in a Box” and the Justin Timberlake-anchored run of viral SNL cameos.
Adams herself has spent 2026 promoting Nightbitch, which moved to streaming this spring, and a pair of upcoming projects that put her opposite directors she has not yet worked with. The Late Night appearance was scheduled originally as a Nightbitch promo slot before NBC pushed it to follow her Tony Awards on-stage moment last weekend at Lincoln Center, where she presented the best featured actress award alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda. Broadway’s 2026 night, which crowned Schmigadoon! best musical, is the subject of our June 8 dispatch.
Disney itself has used the past five years to release Disenchanted (2022), the streaming-only Enchanted sequel that arrived on Disney+ to mixed reviews, and to slot the Giselle character into Disney Junior continuity. The studio’s broader Marvel-meets-preschool animation push, which earlier this week dropped 11 new episodes of Iron Man and His Awesome Friends as our coverage of the new drop reported, has effectively rebuilt the kid-skewing roster Adams once helped anchor.
Late Night with Seth Meyers airs weeknights on NBC and the full Adams interview is streaming now on Peacock. The Lonely Island catalog, including the sketches that did clear dress rehearsal during her 2008 host stint, remains available on the SNL Vault on Peacock as well.
