This Wildly Creepy ‘SNL’ Sketch Of Rami Malek Searching For A “Treat” Haunts My Dreams

There’s no two ways about it: Rami Malek is terrifying.

Even when he’s playing ostensibly noble, if flawed characters — his star-making performance in Mr. Robot, for instance, or his turn as Freddy Mercury in the disastrous Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody — there’s something quietly unnerving about him. No other major A-list star better nails that sense of creeping dread; that sense that every room that Rami Malek walks into suddenly gets colder.

No wonder that he was cast as Lyutsifer Safin, the major baddie in Daniel Craig’s final outing as Bond: no-one is better suited to delivering uncannily calm monologues about the need to “tidy up” the world’s population.

Now, Malek has used that insidious nature for comedy, in a new Saturday Night Live Sketch titled, quite simply, ‘Rami Wants a Treat.’

The premise of the digital short is simple: Rami Malek wants a treat. He’s been a good boy, and he deserves one. After all, as he says himself, if he doesn’t get a treat for his good behaviour, then what was the point of being on good behaviour? Life is all about the carrot and the stick, and Malek deserves a big, juicy carrot.

Written by and co-starring the TikTok famous comedy troupe Please Don’t Destroy, the short is elegant in its simplicity, and neatly subversive in the way that it plays Malek’s discomfiting nature for laughs.

It’s basically as good as short-form comedy gets, a triumph of chaos that includes the instantly iconic sight of Malek hunting through a fridge, looking for ways that he can cause trouble.

Watch it and be awed:

Please Don’t Destroy – Rami Wants a Treat pic.twitter.com/T9DeNyir0d

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) October 17, 2021