April 12, 2026

Who could’ve guessed that the biggest water-cooler moment from night 1 of Coachella 2026 would not be a musical cameo or a particularly galvanizing moment from one of the evening’s headliners, but… a seven-minute monologue by a legendary Hollywood actress in her late 70s? Talk about stunt casting at its most unexpected. Susan Sarandon was brought in to play an elder version of Sabrina Carpenter, midway through that pop superstar’s set. Whatever else may transpire over the weekend, this will surely stand as the festival’s most puzzling, polarizing, dig-it-or-hate-it moment… although “moment” may be too modest a word for an epic scene that its detractors felt seemed to go on just shy of forever.

It couldn’t have seemed much more incongruous, in the middle of an hour-and-a-half performance that was otherwise 98% a musical sex comedy, as is the singer’s entertaining custom. Amid the nonstop choreography and gags, suddenly things came to a crawl for seven minutes of actual seriousness — as if Carpenter were outsourcing the depth of the set to Sarandon. The actress sat in a car in a makeshift drive-in that was set up in the middle of the main stage field, hair blowing in the desert breeze as she reminisced from some point in the future about what it had been like to once be the pop tart Sabrina Carpenter, with plenty of rumination about fame and family and the pros and cons of constantly projecting positivity.

Questions abounded as it went on. Why drop such a sober sequence into a performance whose other cameos — by Will Ferrell (also live) and Samuel Jackson Jr. and Sam Neil (pre-recorded) — leaned toward pure fun? Who wrote this soliloquy? Was it all scripted, or partly improvised? Was it intended to go on that long? And are we looking a gift horse in the mouth if we complain about such an unusual interruption in an otherwise pretty pro-forma pop festival?

Well, that last question is mine, and maybe mine alone. I seem to be in a distinct minority when it comes to getting an admiring kick out of Sarandon’s cameo, which I’ve now rewatched a couple of times, in bootleg clips. (Coachella is pretty good at having anything quickly pulled down that home viewers might try posting to social media from the livestream, but it’s out there.) Variety‘s own recap late Friday night said “the scene, a bungled reflection on wish fulfillment, brought the pop show to a screeching halt.” I’d probably have to agree that it did just that, or brought it to a crawl, at least… but is that necessarily a bad thing? Is momentum everything, even in pop music? You could argue that it’s a lot. But I’m also a fan of those outlier dynamic moments where something that is supposed to be about escapism tries to get real for a minute — even if, at this point in her career and persona, Carpenter felt compelled to hire someone to suggest she can foresee going all mature on us someday.

I’m also fascinated by the idea that the whole thing might’ve been partly an accident. Sources on the ground at Coachella indicated that the monologue was originally supposed to be shorter, and that Sarandon was asked to stretch to cover a changeover that was taking longer than intended. That hasn’t been confirmed, and there was nothing about Carpenter’s subsequent costuming that looked like it should have taken seven minutes to pull off, by itself. But the actress didn’t appear to be reading off a prompter, and if indeed she was making some of it up as she went along, it was a pretty good example of an age-old actors’ class exercise in improv. Did Carpenter script all the stuff about the (apparently) fake sister and niece, or was Sarandon freestyling some of that? The fact that we’re even wondering about this makes the bit at least as fun as the old-school song-and-dance of the big production numbers, if you have a liking for the kind of risk-taking that may or may not go off the rails a little.

And however much the whole thing was or wasn’t 100% pre-scripted, it made for an amusing punchline to take the piss out of the monologue’s philosophizing by having her “Girls Meets World” co-star Corey Fogelmanis show up at the end as a carhop, getting bogged down in the minutiae of closing out tabs and tapping credit cards. On top of how good the key casting was: Who could have been a better (or more aspirational) choice to play a Carpenter with a few more decades of mileage on her?

One hates to read too much into any of this. You only had to go on X during the livestream to say fans commending Carpenter for hiring Sarandon to play her shortly after the actress complained she’d been blacklisted for her pro-Palestinian activism. It’s less likely the singer brought her idol in for the gig to make a statement on the Middle East, or even show-business blackballing, than it is that she just really loves “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” But, regardless of what you think of anyone’s latter-day politics, Carpenter just has good taste in screen sirens.

The “Aunt Sabrina” interlude will no doubt be held up by many as an example of how to stop a show, in the wrong way. But maybe we’d be better off if more pop stars thought of more ways to throw quietly interesting and unexpected asides into their shows, even at the risk of having audiences scratching their heads for a minute. Or, sure, seven. Take a note, Addison Rae — although maybe you want to play it safe and only have Helen Mirren or Sally Field pop in for a mini-monologue.