Watch Brad Pitt Play Dr. Fauci on Saturday Night Live

SNL returned with its second “at home” episode last night, and in the cold open it made Dr. Anthony Fauci’s dreams come true. In the show’s latest celebrity cameo stunt cast of a government official, Brad Pitt played the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as he tried to decipher and translate President Trump’s absurd and dangerous statements on the coronavirus. From Trump’s early proclamation that a vaccine would be coming “relatively soon,” to last week’s addle-brained musings about killing the virus through disinfectant injections, Pitt’s Fauci tries his hardest to make any sense out of the patent nonsense that regularly pours out of Trump’s mouth. Last night’s episode didn’t have a “host” in the way the first quarantine episode did—there was no Tom Hanks this time to do a monologue from his kitchen—but Pitt did introduce last night’s musical guest, Miley Cyrus, so perhaps those unofficial SNL record keepers online will add this to Pitt’s episode tally. Either way, getting one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, fresh off his first Oscar win, to play a highly visible public figure who’s deeply connected to the pandemic that has driven us all indoors for several weeks is exactly the kind of thing a show does when it wants to go viral, so, uh, hey: good work, SNL.