Gays. In. Space! Bowen Yang explains the Fire Island bit and his obsession with the SNL sketch
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Warning: This article contains a minor spoiler from Fire Island.
One of Bowen Yang's favorite Saturday Night Live sketches of all time to this day is Gays in Space, the recurring bit written by James Anderson that started in 2005 as a fake sci-fi show on the Trio network. A glitzed-out Maya Rudolph would perform the opening theme song before each installment, focusing on the adventures of a gay spaceship crew, captained by the host of the week.
It's not a coincidence that Fire Island, the new rom-com Yang stars in with creator Joel Kim Booster, references Gays in Space. Booster incorporated the sketch in some of the earliest drafts of the script, even before Yang was hired on SNL.
"I was kind of, for a second, side-eyeing Joel as we were going into production," Yang recalls of that moment in the film. "I was like, 'Is it obnoxious if my character references SNL? Does that seem so masturbatory?' But Joel was like, 'No! We have to keep this in.' This is because this is how we talk as friends."
Searchlight Pictures; Dana Edelson/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images; Searchlight Pictures Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang discuss the "Gays in Space" bit in 'Fire Island.'
In the queer spin on Pride & Prejudice, Fire Island sees a group of friends enjoying a week-long vacation together at the titular New York getaway. Yang's Howie falls for a doctor named Charlie (James Scully), and the two find themselves flirting poolside at a house party while Howie explains Gays in Space to him as Booster's Noah arrives on the scene.
"It was actually cut down, too," Booster separately tells EW of that moment. "There's an even more extended version where we talk in depth about Gays in Space."
"As comedians, we've talked about formative comedy. And for a lot of queer men our age, it was Maya Rudolph in the early aughts," Yang says of his relationship with Booster. "It was that era of SNL, and Joel was pretty insistent on keeping that line in [the movie]. It's a little nod to the places that we ended up, but I think it's a really sweet, authentic thing that Joel and I do. We would watch Gays in Space on a slow, boring night when we would just hang out."
Booster now stars on Apple TV+ sitcom Loot with Rudolph, and he says they bonded over Gays in Space. He considers her "a gay icon."
"It was so funny to go straight from Fire Island to working with Maya," Booster remarks. "For all of it to come full circle like this — for me to be on a show with Maya, for Bowen to be saying that line [in Fire Island] as a cast member on SNL — is so wild. I feel like I'm a witch. I don't even know how I got so lucky."
Fire Island is currently streaming on Hulu.
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