Cynthia Erivo hosted Saturday Night Live UKover the weekend and performed in a Wicked parody as part of the show.
Taking influence from the Nigerian film industry of the early 2000s, Nollywood Presents: Nigerian Wicked saw Erivo playing Glinda opposite Ayoade Bamgboye’s Elphaba. The pair meet at Shiz university before travelling to LagOz to meet The Wizard (Hammed Animashaun).
Arriving in the “Emerald, White and Emerald City” (the colours of the Nigerian flag), Glinda reveals she’s asking The Wizard for a Birkin while Elphaba wants a “skinny BBL that defies gravity. The pair almost kiss on a couple of occasions, and Bamgboye’s tries to pull off Erivo’s ‘Defying Gravity’ note.
The sketch, which has already racked up more than 1.6million views on YouTube, was written by Bamgboye and directed by Will Farrell. “Finally achieved my dream of directing a Nigerian version of Wicked,” he wrote on Instagram.
“I will write a book on the love I have for Ayoade Bamgboye and it will take my whole life to express the depths, and even then it won’t be finished. I will have to speak to my granddaughter from the other side so she can carry on writing it and then she will have to pass it on to hers and so on and so forth,” said former SNL UK host Aimee Lou Wood while sharing the sketch on social media. And she’s not the only fan of Nigerian Wicked either.
SNLUK is absolutely eating the original SNL up it’s just so much funnier https://t.co/TzDLlqKeml
— taylor venus
(@vampirealicent) October 25, 2026
“Nigerian Wicked might be the best SNL sketch ever and only SNL UK could have pulled it off,” wrote one fan on X. “This is a Top Five sketch of any sketch, of any sketch show I’ve ever seen. It’s literally perfectly accurate,” said another. “You can tell when the writers room is a bunch of funny people writing about their own experiences and not nepo baby rich kids who steal jokes from Twitter,” added a third.
“I’m completely blown away by the response to Nigerian Wicked (LGBTQ). I simply must stress that a group of miraculous people put their all into this. I wrote the most unhinged thing I’ve ever imagined and Cynthia Erivo made such light work of it. I’ll need another six-12 months to process what it’s like to witness her craft up close,” Bamgboye wrote on Instagram before thanking the rest of the cast and crew.
Elsewhere in the show, Erivo played a queer version of Rapunzel with an overgrown toenail instead of the usual long hair, and performed as part of the “modern music” parody alongside Annabel Marlow that seemed to take inspiration from Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’.
The Cynthia Erivo-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live UK is the final one of 2026, though the show will return in early 2027.
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