SNL viewers stunned after show opens season finale with bizarre Epstein sketch

The final show of Saturday Night Live's 51st season left fans in absolute hysterics yesterday, after the crew decided to open their show with a surreal sketch where Will Ferrell played the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

And Ferrell's performance as the disgraced billionaire pedophile and previous associate of Bill Gates, President Trump, and the former Prince Andrew, was absolutely bizarre, beginning in the Oval Office.

SNL regular James Austin Johnson played a sleepy Trump in the sketch, sitting behind the Resolute Desk and drifting off, just as the president appears to during particularly long and boring meetings.

But then, the phantom of his former friend, played by the Elf star, appears in the Oval Office. Ferrell, with grey hair and shackles to represent the dead sex offender, tells Trump that he has come to pay his 'best friend a visit.'

Will Ferrell is SNL's Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/P1S1Id8P9v

— LateNighter (@latenightercom) May 17, 2026

Clanking his chains like he's a ghost from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Ferrell made a reference to conspiracy theories around Epstein's death, which was supposedly ruled as a suicide.

Ferrell's Epstein ghost offers advice to Trump as he complains about his low presidential and personal approval ratings being in 'the 30s', with the prolific sex offender replying: "The thirties? Gross, call me when it's 17."

Responding to the twisted joke, Johnson's Trump replies: "It's dark, very dark, dark situation. So what are you up to these days, Jeff? How's heaven?"

But after spending over two decades trafficking girls around the world and to his private domaine in the Virgin Islands, for himself and a coterie of rich and powerful associates, it turns out that SNL don't think he's currently hearing choirs of heavenly angels.

"It's really, really hot?" Ferrell's Epstein said, implying that he's actually 'keeping busy' deep in the clutches of hell, playing mahjong with Stalin and serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Then with a jab at his contemporaries, he adds that he wrote jokes for the Kevin Hart roast.

Epstein then asks the president what 'Donny's' plans for the summer are, with the president revealing he is doing 'UFC on my lawn, like I'm white trash on WorldStar [Hip Hop]'.

But the sickest joke of the whole sketch came at its finale, when the president makes a joke and ask Epstein to 'give me some' while lifting his hand for a high five.

"You know what, this time I'm going to leave you hanging," the Epstein character joked to groans and guffaws from the studio audience, in a direct reference to how the dead pedophile was supposedly found hanging in his cell after guards had, for some reason, left him unmonitored.

After this, Epstein's spirit, like the ghost of convictions past, present, and future, begins revealing prophetic visions to Trump, showing most of his team working pointless jobs after his term is up.

That included Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sitting down for a weed-filled interview on a Joe Rogan-esque podcast with FBI chief Kash Patel, while former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is working as a Home Shopping Network presenter.