“Saturday Night Live” cast member Heidi Gardner loves a physical comedy bit. The “SNL” veteran has made a habit of going big on camera to hilarious results, from Weekend Update bits as characters whose physical ticks are their personalities (e.g. The Co-Worker Who’s Extremely Busy Doing Seemingly Nothing on Returning to the Office) to go-for-broke bits that often times result in a literal mess on the “SNL” stage.
Case in point: “Mile High Burger Challenge.” The Season 50 sketch follows a group of siblings discussing their ailing father over lunch, but things take a turn when Gardner’s character decides to tackle an eating challenge – finish a 95 oz. burger and jumbo shake in under 10 minutes. As Bowen Yang and Mikey Day discuss the dire circumstance of their father, Gardner absolutely plows through an enormous cheeseburger, egged on by host Nate Bargatze.
As it turns out, the idea for the sketch came to Gardner over the summer before Season 50 got underway.
“Some video popped up on Instagram, not necessarily a woman in a burger challenge, but just eating a really big sandwich. And I started just imagining how uncomfortable it would be to do that a while others were having a serious conversation,” Gardner told TheWrap.
The Kansas City native said that she was always prepared to actually eat a burger onscreen, so when her co-writers started asking what she wanted to be real and what she wanted to be fake, she went for the genuine article. But there was one aspect she didn’t think about until it was too late.
“I have a total aversion to ketchup. I haven’t had it since I was a little kid, and it’s almost like a phobia at this point,” she said. “I love barbecue sauce, but I’ve just been so used to ordering things with no ketchup. Then we get to rehearsal and they built this giant, incredible burger, it is just layered with ketchup. And I was like, ‘Well, you got to do your job.’”
She remembered the rehearsal not going great. They were still working out the kinks of the physical gag and when the camera would be on her, and when she’d have an opportunity to spit out the mouthfuls of food she was inhaling. “The whole rehearsal felt bad,” she recalled, but then it hit her. She was eating ketchup. “I was trying to give it all but I was, like, scared!”
The fix? They swapped the ketchup for barbecue sauce for Saturday’s show, and the rest is history.
So how does Gardner nail this kind of physical comedy? Precision is key, which she fine-tunes in the rehearsal process.
“When I know all my beats and when I’m precise, then you can really just be free in the moment when you go to live,” she said. “I know where to hit, I know where to point, I know where to look, and then whatever else happens happens and that’s just more cherries on top.”
Looking back on the landmark 50th season of “SNL,” Gardner said she’s still processing it all. She had an incredible moment during the first week that drilled down just how big of a deal this season was going to be.
“So Dana (Carvey) was there, and he was playing Biden, and I have a TV-VCR combo in my dressing room. So I was like, ‘OK, I’m putting on ‘Wayne’s World.’’ I had told him my friends were coming to watch the show from my dressing room and we were gonna watch ‘Wayne’s World,’ and I said ‘You should come back,’” she recalled. “And he came back into the dressing room dressed and ready as Joe Biden and then was quoting Garth. We were watching ‘Wayne’s World.’ He was quoting his own quote, but he was Joe Biden. And me and my friends were just like, what kind of life is this?”
While Gardner has been on “SNL” for eight seasons, she admitted that the COVID season “felt like a stall,” and in some ways the show still feels new to her. But she enjoys getting “more passes at the ball” as one of the more senior members, though deflected when asked if she’s thinking about when her exit might be.
“I mean, to be quite honest, I do get that question a lot, and I don’t even think I’ve had time to process the 50th special,” she said. Gardner was in the midst of planning her grandmother’s 89th birthday party at the time of our interview and said that’s about as far out as she’s thought at the moment. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what life is even beyond three weeks from now.”
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