Veronika Slowikowska’s Sincere Streak

Veronika Slowikowska is trying out a new look. It’s called “crazy outfit, no makeup.” “It’s chic,” she says dryly. And it is: The ensemble in question is a pink-and-white Sandy Liang minidress adorned with rhinestones and the phrase “Princess Team” scrawled in cursive across the chest. She’s paired it with Miu Miu flats, a Prada bag, and a bare face. “I have a pimple right now, and that’s an accessory,” she says, proudly pointing to a spot on her chin. It’s a summery September day when we meet in the backyard of Odd Fox Coffee, one of Slowikowska’s favorite haunts in her Greenpoint, Brooklyn, neighborhood. She usually comes here to write, though it’s been a minute since she last sat down with her iPad and got to work. Saying things have been busy is a vast understatement.

Slowikowska, 30, joined Saturday Night Live last year as a featured player, and ever since Season 51 wrapped in May, she’s been off doing all the things she’s unable to do while the show is in production; namely, filming movies and, in a surprise extracurricular twist, working on music. She just returned from a trip to her home country of Canada last week, where she got to spend some quality time working on puzzles with her live-in boyfriend of around three years (who may or may not be her roommate and frequent collaborator Kyle Chase) and her family in Muskoka. “We did a meeting of parents,” she says. “That was a real crazy collab. It went really well.”

Slowikowska is like a lab-developed amalgam of her comedy heroes — a swirl of Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett’s alt-comedy sensibilities, Jack Black’s physical comedy, and Kristen Wiig’s fearless commitment to the bit — while somehow also being completely one of a kind. Her awkward-character work stands out and will make your skin crawl with secondhand embarrassment as she painfully fumbles words or expertly fails to land a joke. Yet even in that mode, like her most successful SNL predecessors, there’s something about her that makes it impossible to look away — a one-two punch of honed skill (see: the expert way she contorts her face) and good old-fashioned, jumps-off-the-screen star quality.

“I don’t struggle with a big ego, I struggle with not believing in myself enough sometimes: ‘You deserve to be here. Go for it.’”

We’re only a few weeks out from her second season, but Slowikowska still can’t get over Season 51, her big break. “It was everything I thought it would be and more in every sense of the word,” she says. “More pressure than I ever thought, more fun than I ever thought. Really challenging but rewarding. [You’re] like, ‘Will I ever make it through?’ And then you do.”

“It’s so hard, and so fun, and so insane,” she continues, “and there’s nothing like it, but I did it. I was at the wrap party, and I was like, ‘Damn, I did it.’ I didn’t have a panic attack on TV. Yet. The show is its own organism, and you’re your own worst enemy. It’s all [in your head], and it’s what you make of it. But the show’s an incredible, crazy place. I’m so lucky to be there.”

From the outside, it’s easy to assume that a person needs to have a screw loose to sign up to work at a place like SNL. But Slowikowska believes that if she can, then anyone with the performance chops can handle the grueling hours and heartbreaking humiliations that come with the job. She’s humble to the point that she insists she only got the arguably hardest-to-book job in comedy on a fluke: “I’m not someone who believes that I’m special or anything like that, I just work really hard and love being creative. Truly anybody can do it, is the way I like to think of it. If you really wanted to, eventually it’ll filter through. I always picture sand and a filter: If someone quits after a commercial audition or something, then that person’s out, then the next person. Eventually it’ll be just you if you just keep going.”

“We’re not saving lives. We are doing comedy, and we need to remember that.”

It’s possible Studio 8H has never before met someone with so little ego. “I think people think your ego grows at a place like that, and I’m sure some people have over time, but mine was the opposite. I was like, ‘How do I maintain my confidence and find myself in a place of so many amazing people?’” Slowikowska says. “I don’t struggle with a big ego, I struggle with not believing in myself enough sometimes. That’s been a challenge of raising it a little more and going, ‘OK, wait, you got this. You deserve to be here. Go for it.’”

By the time the season ended, the four-month hiatus was a welcome reprieve. But when we meet post–Labor Day, Slowikowska is itching to go back. “It’s the perfect amount of time where at the end you’re like, ‘I’m exhausted. What was that?’ And then slowly you’re like, ‘Oh, I miss everyone,’” she says as she sips a hibiscus tea. When I ask her who she’s closest to at work, she names the obvious — her dressing-roommate Jane Wickline and fellow “Fab Five” featured players Ben Marshall, Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, and Kam Patterson — before listing off just about everyone else in the cast. It’s her castmates, she insists, who made sure she survived the legendary pressure cooker.

“You find your friends and camaraderie,” she says. “There’s no better feeling than the friendships I developed with Ben, or Jane, or Tommy, or anyone. I’m holding their hand before we go live, and I’m like, ‘I got you and you got me.’ It’s like finding a life with these friends. We get dinner together, we get lunch together, we go to movies together. It’s all in favor of the show, but then also just life stuff of I don’t want to be there if I don’t have friends there.”

In the land of remote work, it’s hard not to get a little jealous about the way she describes her days at the office: the laughter, the inside jokes, the midtown salad bowls. She even makes the low moments (rejected pitches and cut sketches) sound fun. “Hanging out in Ben and Tommy’s dressing room, throwing the basketball at their plastic hoop while we talk about how we got cut from a sketch. It’s fun, and we make each other laugh, like, ‘Why am I in this monkey outfit that I just got cut in?’ It’s so funny, inherently,” she says. “We’re not saving lives. We are doing comedy, and [we need] to remember that.”

“We’re craving some more sincerity online in general. Irony is what we’re moving away from. Because cringe can be earnest. If cringe is earnest, it’s deserved.”

Not that she hasn’t experienced wins — some big ones — too. “You get something on and you’re like, ‘Hell, yeah, this is awesome,’” she continues. “But then you lose in the same week because someone cuts you from a sketch and you’re like, ‘Right, totally.’ Then you come out even. That’s what the show does, because of all the wins and losses throughout the week. It’s designed that way. If you’re winning one week, then the next week, you’re losing.”

Unless you’re a complete stranger to the TikTok FYP, Season 51 probably wasn’t the first time Slowikowska stepped into your eyeline. After years of auditioning and working odd jobs in Toronto, she moved to New York City at 27 to pursue comedy and quickly got to work posting sketches from her apartment with Chase and Michael Rees. Chase often plays the straight man to Slowikowska’s hard-to-watch characters as they squabble over anything from typical roommate disputes like borrowing each other’s shoes to Slowikowska’s absurdist attempts to get his attention. (Rees mans the camera.)

It was her TikTok repertoire that helped her secure her first audition for the late-night show’s 50th season in 2024, where she made it to the final round. When they called her back to audition the next year, she knew enough to approach the process with a self-assuredness that could only come from having gone through the gauntlet once before, thinking in the back of her mind the whole time, “Why would they call me back unless they wanted me?” Still, she probably couldn’t have predicted that in a year’s time, she would already be well on her way to cementing herself in the 30 Rock hall of fame and have a great rapport with the only other Canadian in the room: Lorne Michaels.

“It’s so great that he knows where I’m from and the culture, and that Canadians are different than Americans in whatever way,” Slowikowska says of the show’s almost-mythical creator and executive producer. “He understands that, and I think he sees me as being very Canadian. I feel seen that he knows where I’m from.”

“Music has been something I knew I was always going to do. I’m having the most fun exercising a new muscle. It feels very good not to have to be funny for a minute.”

Having built her brand off of cringe comedy online, one would expect Slowikowska’s answers to be veiled in layers of irony and sarcasm. Instead, she oozes sincerity, a quality that she expects to cross over into comedy soon. In fact, she sees her casting as emblematic of the changing comedy moment in our culture. “I think we’re craving some more sincerity online in general, whether that be how people look or how you can do whatever you want. Irony, I think, is what we’re moving away from. Because cringe can be earnest. If cringe is earnest, it’s deserved,” she says. “Sincerity is in, I think. And that can live in the cringe space, but it has to be sincere.”

That earnestness shows up in spades in her newly launched music career. On Aug. 26, Slowikowska released “I Don’t Know Why I Said That,” a shimmery bedroom-indie-pop song with a new jack swing flair, under the name Me As A Girl. The video, filmed in New Jersey two days after the song was recorded, sees Slowikowska hiding behind her new pop persona in a Katy Perry “California Gurls”-esque wig and various Snapchat filters as she brings to life a moment of too-real insecurity: “I don’t know what I said, I don’t know why I said that,” she sings. “I don’t know where my head’s at / You know I don’t know why I do what I do / Maybe I’ll die, but baby, I’ll try / It’s late and I’m high, yes, I know I said that.”

Slowikowska’s passion for music has been all over her SNL career thus far: The Season 51 sketch she considers a highlight is “Cousin Planet,” a hyperpop rap that declares all cousins return to a different planet after the holidays; you may have also noticed her in prominent roles in musical sketches with celebrity hosts like Sabrina Carpenter and Connor Storrie.

As Me As A Girl, she already has a handful of songs in the vault ready to go, with more in progress, and she even has a show booked at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn for the week after we met. But, to be clear, Slowikowska has no intention to pivot away from her day job anytime soon. “It’s a passion project that’s just so fun,” she says of the music sideline. “I’m a very creative person who doesn’t really stop, and making music has been something I knew I was always going to do, but I still don’t know where it’s going to go or what it’s going to be. But I’m having the most fun exercising a new muscle. It feels very good not to have to be funny for a minute. It’s a new tool, a new way of expressing myself that’s been very fun. I’m taking it easy.”

If “taking it easy” looks like recording music, filming movies, and posting multiple sketches online every week, then Slowikowska is taking things very easy. Soon, though, she’ll be back to writing with her SNL colleagues all night long, laughing to the point of tears at table read, and getting cut seconds before air. “I’m excited to be tired,” she says, sincerity brimming from her widened eyes.

Top image credit: Albright Fashion Library jacket and shorts; Stylist’s own top; Déhanche belt; Herbert Levine boots.