Jon Hamm's Sax-y "Sergio" SNL Sketch Parodied Two Beloved Horror Movies
The April 12 SNL Host ruined Andy Samberg's life in the surreal 2010 Digital Short "The Curse."
With three — soon to be four — hosting stints and over a dozen episode cameos under his belt, it's safe to say Jon Hamm loves Saturday Night Live. And in his excellent second outing in January 2010, Hamm proved he's up for anything, from playing a terrifying version of himself alongside Michael Bublé to transforming into the spiritual entity known as Sergio.
A Lonely Island Digital Short, "The Curse" co-starred Season 35 cast members Andy Samberg, Fred Armisen, Jenny Slate, Jason Sudeikis, Kristen Wiig, and Bill Hader. In it, Samberg plays a harried New York City businessman who makes the life-changing mistake of stepping on a stranger's "sacred talisman." After refusing to pay nor apologize for ruining the dreamcatcher, the man (Armisen) places a curse on him. And it's one sax-y, sax-y curse.
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Jon Hamm's Sergio mesmerized SNL's Season 35 cast in "The Curse"
Samberg's character shrugs the curse off, but it soon comes to pass as he leads a boardroom meeting. A rumble of thunder, the tone of a woodwind, and then... a shirtless man in suspenders with long flowing hair and too many necklaces bursts through the wall to play a sultry saxophone solo.
Like the fog that surrounds them, the man's music seems to envelop the office workers as they fall under his hip-swaying spell, ignoring the businessman to dance with him. That's when Hamm whips toward the camera to pronounce himself "Sergio!"
"So he just came through the wall?" a beautiful woman (Slate) asks Samberg's character as they unwind with wine at home. Now Sergio's crashing through that wall, entrancing her. When businessman tells his therapist (Jason Sudeikis) that he really might be under a curse, poof: the therapist explodes in another cloud of smoke and Sergio's back again.
Pleading with the man who cursed him to fix it, he's freed from the curse when he mends and keeps the trinket on his wall. But years later, en route to the hospital delivery room, his pregnant wife (Wiig) tells him she broke it by accident.
Let's just say it's not a baby she gives birth to. Watch "The Curse" from Season 35, Episode 13 above, and watch Jon Hamm host SNL on April 12, 2025 with Musical Guest Lizzo.
SNL's Sergio sketch brings to mind The Lost Boys and Drag Me to Hell
Per Lonely Island's website, "The Curse" was directed by Jonathan Krisel while trio members Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer were wrapped up in other projects (Jorma was helming the MacGruber movie based on Will Forte's SNL character).
The plot of the Digital Short is similar to that of Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell, which was released the year before in 2009 (a young woman is placed under a deadly curse by someone she's denied a bank loan to, and it slowly destroys every aspect of her life). But fans of the 1987 vampire classic The Lost Boys would spot Sergio's visual inspiration a mile away.
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The movie features a performance from a ripped, shirtless man with hair and necklaces identical to Sergio's, who sings and plays a mean saxophone on a song called "I Still Believe" (watch the scene here). Played by musician Tim Cappello, the brief appearance was so memorable it even inspired a spinoff comic book where the oiled-up sax man is a vampire hunter.
One more crazy SNL-related connection: In 2011 — one year after SNL's "The Curse" — a series of viral videos starred a musician by the name of Sergio (!!) Flores, who'd prank people in public by popping up in long hair and bare arms to play George Michael's "Careless Whisper." He billed himself as Sexy Sax Man ...and the director of those videos was none other than Mike Diva, who now directs SNL pretaped sketches like Pedro Pascal's "Mario Kart Trailer."
It's Sergio's world, and we're just living in it.
