Every single person I just mentioned is here, by the way. Every. Single. One. Harrelson’s wearing a tie-dye tie that someone has inexplicably and indecipherably signed with a Sharpie. (“Who signed your tie?” I ask him. “Thanks,” he says with a wobbly smile.) Sandler—who the internet regularly memes wearing basketball shorts and baggy polos—is in a nicely fitted tux. In fact, the person with the most “Sandler-like” outfit is not Sandler at all but Sudeikis, who is in a hoodie and baseball cap.
Some other late-night outfits of the late-night crowd? Ego Nwodim is in a baby-blue Marc Jacobs dress (look 13 from his fall 2024 collection, to be exact), whereas Chloe Fineman is in vintage Guy Laroche couture. (Her stylist, Yael Quint, tells me that her dress is from 1975—making it 50 years old, just like SNL.) Heidi Garner is in a sparkly sequined Sandy Liang minidress, which she’s paired with ballet flats and a tiara. Emma Stone, meanwhile, is in the same custom Louis Vuitton dress with comically large, popcorn-filled pockets that she wore on the show. At the moment, Stone’s left one fits her entire purse. (Which frees her hands up to do other things: Mainly waving an Italian breadstick in the air along with Alana Haim, who soon started to air drum to the beat of the music. Sandler, passing by, joins in for a few moments.)
There’s a lot of those little moments. JJ Abrams high-fives Keith Richards. Kim Kardashian listens intently to Bowen Yang by the bar. Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega pose for photos together on the dance floor. In a nearby booth, Peter Dinklage lounges with Natasha Lyonne and Chris Rock. Lorne Michaels, the legendary patriarch of Saturday Night Live, sits at a table in a back room alongside Baldwin. Olivia Munn and John Mulaney hold hands the entire night. Meanwhile, despite the majority of the party’s action now occurring on the third floor of the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom, Steve Martin and Catherine O’Hara sit on a couch right by the first-floor entrance. O’Hara’s shoes are kicked off.
Elsewhere, the stage on the third floor—despite being completely outfitted with amps, microphones, and drums—has sat empty for hours. Someone tells me that there’s no official performance schedule, per se. They’ve just set it up for anyone who feels like getting up there—a nod to the Blues Bar days. And at 2:30 a.m., that was Arcade Fire.
On more than one occasion in the ’90s, as Saturdays turned into Sundays, Ana Gasteyer found herself out way too late at an SNL after-party. “Will Ferrell used to always say, ‘Uh-oh, it’s the icky blue light,’” she said. “We would look out the window and it was light outside, and we would all crawl home to bed.” As the band played on and the ballroom at the Plaza became even more packed, it was clear that for many people here, it would be an icky-blue-light night. Let’s just hope, unlike Bryant, they make it all the way through their apartment doors.
