Description
Ashley Padilla, who captured hearts as a star cast member of SNL this past year, made the room laugh with a toast full of jokes and references to her most notable sketches.
“You may know me from a sketch where I fart in front of all my coworkers and then get very, very mad about it right after,” Padilla said, prompting laughs throughout the room. “And if you don't know me from that, then you don't know me at all.”
But soon, Padilla shared a vulnerable moment, saying it “is hard to give a toast when you know you should not be here.”
“There were so many chances to mess up my life along the way. I tried to quit comedy. I tried to quit on myself an embarrassing amount of times,” she said. “I told myself it was too hard, too painful, too impossible.”
But despite the negative self-talk along the way, Padilla said that there was always a voice in the back of her head telling her to “keep going.”
“I can viscerally remember hearing it in the backseat of my mother’s car, tears streaming down my face because I was failing school,” she recalled. “And there was that sound inside me that I should keep going.”
In the end, this was the message of Padilla’s toast, thanking that voice, “whispering inside all of us, pushing us all to keep going.”
Read more: https://time.com/collection/time100-next-gala/2026/laney-crowell-time-earth-award-speech/
Subscribe to TIME’s YouTube channel ►► http://ti.me/subscribe-time
Subscribe to TIME: https://ti.me/3E3UCqt
Get the day’s top headlines to your inbox, curated by TIME editors: https://ti.me/48dFNwQ
Follow us:
X (Twitter): https://ti.me/3xTVwSk
Facebook: https://ti.me/3xWI2Fg
Instagram: https://ti.me/3dO9Rcc
0:00 Ashley Padilla Opens With Jokes
0:23 Introducing Herself and Her SNL Career
1:06 Ashley Reacts to Her TIME100 Next Honor
1:30 Finding Hope for the Future
2:16 Almost Quitting Comedy and Overcoming Rejection
3:20 Ashley's Inspiring Toast to Never Giving Up