Now in her second season on Saturday Night Live, Bay Area native Ashley Padilla has proven to be a versatile and hilarious cast member who's already beating out all her castmates this season in total screen time and sketch appearances.

A clear standout star on Season 51 of Saturday Night Live, featured player Ashley Padilla has been matching and breaking records with her on-air appearances, as New York Magazine notes in a new profile this week. The 32-year-old seemingly came out of nowhere, without a significant online or standup presence before joining the cast in September 2024, and it's clear she's already a favorite with the writers and creator Lorne Michaels.

Padilla has zero complaints so far about the show, or its notoriously grueling production schedule.

"I get to make money doing comedy. I’m surrounded by the funniest fucking people you can imagine. There’s an office for us to go to, to write our comedy. We get to be funny on television and then do it again the week after," Padilla tells the magazine. "What could I possibly complain about? My one issue is that there’s not enough time in the world to do it forever. I have so many ideas all the time. They start to pile up. I wish we had a hundred shows."

As NY Mag reports, noting that SNL superfans across social media have been clocking the data, Padilla has tied the record for crossing the 100-sketch mark in the fewest number of episodes (28), and she currently leads the entire cast in terms of sketch count and screentime this season. One sketch you may recognize for its recent virality: Padilla's appearance as a Trump-voting mom whose adult children are freaking out over recent change of heart about the president. There's also a sketch that came out of her days at LA's Groundlings — also the comedic training grounds of Kristin Wiig, Will Ferrell, and Melissa McCarthy — "Haircut," which was a pretty immediate sensation on social media this past fall as well.

And who can forget "Surprise," the elaborate fart-joke sketch starring Padilla that has also made her a viral hit — all because of her defeated, all-too-real, shame-filled reactions to her spontaneous farts.

Padilla says she grew up the second-oldest of four kids with a single mom in Livermore. She describes her mom as someone who "worked her way up in a company: Fake it till you make it. Go out there and fucking try it."

We likely will continue seeing Padilla in a lot of sketches before the season is done — men now outnumber women in the SNL cast two to one, so Padilla is often being called on to play a mom, wife, or girlfriend in other people's sketches. And she says she's more than glad to do it.

As for future plans, she is all but guaranteed to show up on the big screen — she's in the rewriting process of a screenplay she describes as "a comedy about female ambition."

We can't wait.