Saturday Night Live has always been solid at nabbing some of the biggest stars in the country for hosting gigs, and the next two hosts have been absolutely huge in the past year. Oscar-nominated actor Michael Keaton will take the hosting reins at the beginning of April, while Empire star Taraji P. Henson will handle it the week after. Too bad they aren’t hosting together, because a Birdman/Empire sketch would have been…pretty stupid, probably.
Keaton will grace the Saturday Night Live stage for the third time on April 4, with the hugely popular Grammy-nominated Carly Rae Jepsen making her debut as the sketch series’ musical guest. It’ll be the first time in over 20 years for Keaton, who last hosted in 1992 when Batman Returns took over America, and his first time was ten years before that, around the time Night Shift came out. Having starred in this year’s Best Picture winner, Keaton is a solid choice to mix it up with this young cast.
April 11 will see Henson, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, take on hosting duties. Following a successful stint on Person of Interest and in the midst of her solid big screen career, Henson reteamed with Hustle & Flow co-star Terrence Howard for Fox’s musical soap Empire and quickly became one of the most enjoyable characters on TV as the insanely catty Cookie Lyon. SNL already did an Empire parody a few weeks back, but there’s no way they make it through this episode without dipping into that well again.
The musical guest for Henson’s episode will be the folk rock group Mumford & Sons, who will be performing on SNL for the second time, having first played back in 2012. They’ll presumably be playing at least one track from their upcoming third album “Wilder Mind,” which comes out on May 4.
Keaton has several films in the can right now, including the church molestation scandal thriller Spotlight and the animated spinoff Minions, with upcoming projects like the McDonald’s biopic The Founder and the King Kong thriller Kong: Skull Island. Henson, meanwhile, will once again appear opposite Howard for Peter Billingsley’s crime drama Term Life later this year.
Chris Hemsworth was the last to host Saturday Night Live earlier this month, and Dwayne Johnson will be returning this weekend to host for the fourth time.
