Watch Ryan Gosling in 'Papyrus 2,' 'SNL' sketch about 'Avatar' font

Publish date: 2024-06-13

Like many Saturday Night Live fans, Ryan Gosling still has a certain font on his mind.

The Barbie star's return to host SNL for the third time this weekend featured the hilarious reprisal of "Close Encounters" with Kate McKinnon's alien abductee, Ms. Rafferty, but that wasn't the only fan-favorite sketch from Gosling's past to get new life. Near the end of Saturday's episode, a graphic flashed on screen telling fans to head to social media after the show to watch "Papyrus 2."

When Gosling hosted SNL's season 43 premiere back in 2017, the best sketch of the night featured the actor as a man tormented by the realization that the title for James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster film Avatar appeared to use the default typeface Papyrus. "He just highlighted 'Avatar.' He clicked the drop-down menu, and then he just randomly selected Papyrus like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden, yanking leaves along the way," Gosling's character tells his therapist (McKinnon) in the original sketch.

The follow-up dropped online several hours after Saturday's episode concluded. In it, Gosling's character, Steven, is still in therapy for his logo-based spiral, doing his best to avoid triggers, like a flyer for Edible Arrangements. Then, while in the dentist's chair, he is forced to watch 2023's Avatar: The Way of Water, but to his relief the title looks different. "It's not a huge improvement, but it's not Papyrus. Somebody must have said something," he says in a perfectly meta joke.

But later that night Steven realizes he's wrong. It is still Papyrus — with one small change: "He just put it in bold," he says, panicking. "All the money in the world, and he just put it in bold."

The "he" refers to the Avatar franchise's fictional "Logo Title Design Specialist," named Jacob Crone. Steven then enters a Joker-esque level of madness that includes seeing everything in Papyrus font, from the subway station to a Taco Bell. He manipulates a woman (Sarah Sherman) into dating him just to attend her work event, the Disney Graphics Awards Ball, where he confronts Crone, played by former SNL cast member Kyle Mooney, reprising his previous role.

In a surprise twist, it turns out Steven's full name is Steven Wingdings, son of the creator of the font that uses symbols instead of letters, and his true affliction boils down to daddy issues.

"My dad was so hard to read," he admits. "Avatar wasn't too big a movie to use Papyrus. It's humble enough to say thank you."

The sketch's final graphic reads "papyrus" in that font with a series of Wingdings symbols underneath that translate to "The [W]ay of Steven."

Former SNL writer and Los Espookys star Julio Torres, the whimsical mind behind the first "Papyrus" sketch, returned to write the follow-up. "A sequel to Papyrus 1 just cuz," he posted on Instagram on Sunday morning. "Not sure how this was 'cut for time' just bc it’s 3 times the length of a regular sketch and also I don’t work at [SNL] anymore but here this is in case you need it?"

Torres previously told Entertainment Weekly that the idea originated as a tweet he'd posted about noticing the font similarities that caught Gosling's attention. "That was actually like a throwaway joke. I was using it in my stand-up for a couple of weeks," Torres said. "And then when I was talking to Ryan Gosling about what I was thinking about writing for that week, he was like, 'Well what about that Papyrus thing?'"

Gosling was fully invested from the start. "He was just so committed and finding the intricacies of this man that he developed a whole character around it," the Problemista director and star said.

In a 2022 interview, Jon Landau, who produced Avatar and its sequel, told EW that he had seen the earlier sketch and found it "fun that it stimulated a conversation." He also confirmed that instead of using Papyrus, they'd actually created their own font for the franchise, named Toruk.

"But the Papyrus font is a fun thing," he said, "and I also love the fact that… [the sketch] was certainly several years after the movie came out, and I guess it illustrated to people who were questioning Avatar's cultural relevance that it was still part of the culture."

A third movie in the Avatar franchise is planned for release in late 2025.

Watch the original "Papyrus" sketch and its sequel above.

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