Ashley Padilla is having a moment, and honestly? We’re here for it. The 32-year-old Livermore native is in her second season on Saturday Night Live and she’s already breaking records left and right. We’re talking leading the entire cast in sketch count and screen time this season. Yeah, you read that right.

What makes Padilla’s rise even wilder is that she seemingly came out of nowhere before joining SNL’s cast in September 2024. She didn’t have some massive online presence or a huge stand-up following , she just showed up and immediately proved herself to be a versatile comedic force that Lorne Michaels and the writers couldn’t get enough of.

According to New York Magazine’s recent profile on her, SNL superfans have been doing the math and found that Padilla has tied the record for reaching 100+ sketches in just 28 episodes. That’s insanely fast. The woman is literally everywhere on the show, and we can’t help but appreciate her energy.

Padilla’s sketches have been hitting different too. You’ve probably seen the viral one where she plays a Trump-voting mom whose adult kids are losing it over her recent change of heart about the president. There’s also “Haircut,” which blew up on social media last fall , a sketch she actually developed during her time at LA’s legendary Groundlings comedy school, the same place that trained Kristin Wiig, Will Ferrell, and Melissa McCarthy. And then there’s “Surprise,” an elaborate fart-joke sketch that became a viral sensation because of Padilla’s hilariously defeated, shame-filled reactions to her own spontaneous farts. Comedy gold, honestly.

What’s really refreshing is how genuinely stoked Padilla is about the whole thing. In her interview with New York Magazine, she’s like, “I get to make money doing comedy. I’m surrounded by the funniest fucking people you can imagine”. She’s got zero complaints about SNL’s notoriously brutal production schedule, saying her only “issue” is that there isn’t enough time to do it forever because she has too many ideas.

Padilla grew up as the second-oldest of four kids with a single mom in Livermore. She credits her mom with instilling that “fake it till you make it” mentality that clearly helped her navigate the competitive world of comedy.

Right now, she’s in high demand on set , partly because the SNL cast still skews heavily toward men (two to one), which means she’s constantly being called on to play moms, wives, and girlfriends in other sketches. But she says she’s genuinely glad to do it. Beyond SNL, Padilla is working on a screenplay she describes as “a comedy about female ambition,” so we’re definitely expecting to see her name on the big screen soon. The future’s looking really bright for this Bay Area native.