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SNL's "Papyrus" Sketch with Ryan Gosling Made James Cameron "Double Down" on the Font
Avatar director James Cameron was "haunted" by the sketch.
In the weeks leading up to February 16's three-hour 50th anniversary celebration on NBC, the team behind Saturday Night Live has selected one sketch from every single season — 50 seasons in 50 days — to reflect the show's rich legacy across five decades. Presenting the sketch chosen to represent Season 43: "Papyrus," starring Host Ryan Gosling along with Season 43 cast members Cecily Strong, Kate McKinnon, Chris Redd, Heidi Gardner, and Kyle Mooney.
Many times over the years, the hilarious minds at Saturday Night Live have managed to take a random idea and turn it into something that takes on a life of its own. And that’s exactly what happened in Season 43’s “Papyrus” sketch, starring September 30, 2017 Host Ryan Gosling as a man haunted by the font used for the Avatar logo.
In the style of a dramatic short film, the sketch follows a man named Steven, played by Gosling, who can’t stop obsessing over why the graphic designers working on 2009’s massive hit Avatar would use such a simple font to represent the big budget franchise.
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“I thought it was behind me, but the dreams came back,” Steven narrates at the top of the sketch. “I was up all night. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. It haunts me … I forgot about it for years, but then I remembered that Avatar, the giant international blockbuster, used the Papyrus font as its logo.”
Sitting silently in the kitchen, Steven worries (then annoys) his wife (Cecily Strong) before heading to see his therapist (Kate McKinnon) to talk through his demons.
“Avatar, like that movie from nine years ago?” the therapist says.
“Yeah, he just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the dropdown menu, and he just randomly selected Papyrus,” Steven answers. “Like a thoughtless child just wandering by a garden and yanking leaves along the way.”
Once he finds out about all the Avatar sequels and how the logo font hasn’t really changed, Steven angrily flips a table. “He just got away with it. This man, this professional graphic designer. Was it laziness? Was it cruelty?” he chimes in as a narrator once again.
Steven’s friend (Chris Redd) unsuccessfully tries to calm him down, insisting that the font might not even be Papyrus or they “clearly modified” it. “Whatever they did, it wasn’t enough!” Steven screams as he smashes a glass. This blind rage apparently comes out any time he sees the font on things like “off-brand teas” and “Shakira merch.”
Unable to forget about it, Steven drives to the home of Avatar’s graphic designer (Kyle Mooney) just “to see him do his little things, live his insane little life.” But he becomes too distracted and crashes his car into a fire hydrant.
As a neighbor (Heidi Gardner) runs out to see if he’s OK, Steven is still laser-focused on Avatar. “I know what you did!” he screams at Mooney looking at him from the window.
SNL’s “Papyrus” sketch was written by Julio Torres
Before starring, writing, and directing movies and TV shows like Problemista and Fantasmas, Julio Torres was a writer on SNL from 2016 to 2019. And one of his most memorable sketches is 2017’s “Papyrus.” In 2024, Torres also wrote Season 49’s cut-for-time sequel to the viral sketch when Gosling returned to host the April 13 episode.
Torres told Entertainment Weekly that Gosling had reached out to him to write the sequel. "He was like, ‘Should we make a sequel?’ and at first I was like, why?” Torres recalled. “But then I started thinking about it. I wrote it, and then I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s bringing this to life yet again.’”
RELATED: Papyrus 2: SNL Brings Back Ryan Gosling's Ponytailed Font-Hater in Cut-for-Time Sketch
In the “Papyrus” follow-up, also starring Mooney, Steven’s years of working on himself to move past his obsession are upended when he finds out Avatar 2’s updated logo is just Papyrus in bold.
In a June 2024 interview with TODAY, Torres was asked if he thought he had anything to do with the font change.
“You know, as artists, we try to be agents of change, and it is a bummer that this is the one thing I’ve been able to change. That out of all the causes that I care about, it’s the Avatar font that changed,” Torres said with a laugh. “But hey, maybe bigger and better things some other time!”
Avatar director James Cameron joked that SNL’s “Papyrus” sketch has “haunted” him
James Cameron, who wrote and directed the Avatar films, as well as other big blockbuster movies like Titanic, confirmed in a 2022 interview with BBC Radio 1 that he’s seen SNL’s “Papyrus” sketch and found it “pretty funny.”
“It’s haunted me,” Cameron joked when asked how he felt about the sketch. “Not really. It is pretty funny, I’m just astonished that they spent that much money on a little cinematic vignette that’s around such a wispy, thin concept.”
Following the sketch, Cameron said that he told his Avatar team to go all in on the Papyrus font. “I said, ‘Alright guys, we are doubling down! We’re using Papyrus for everything!’”
While Cameron is pro-Papyrus now, he admitted that he didn't even know that was the font used for Avatar’s logo. “The funniest thing about that whole story is I didn’t know it was Papyrus. Nobody asked me,” he told BBC Radio 1. “I just thought the art department had come up with this cool font.”
In a 2023 interview with People, Cameron joked that the sketch presented him with a "dilemma" for Avatar 2. "I mean, the thing is, we actually now had a dilemma on movie two," he told the magazine. "It's like, 'Are we going to keep the same font, the highest-grossing film in history, or are we going to change it?' Mess with the formula. It's like, 'F--- it, we're using the font. If Ryan gets his panties in a bunch over it, then so be it.'"
