Colin Jost

Colin Jost is a writer first, and that explains most of how he lands on screen. He joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live in 2005, served as a co-head writer from 2012 to 2015 and again from 2017 to 2022 alongside Michael Che, and has co-anchored Weekend Update since 2014. It is an unusual career shape: two decades inside a single institution, most of it spent building other people's jokes before being handed a desk and told to deliver his own.

The Update persona is a deliberate piece of engineering. Jost plays the smug, well-fed Ivy League guy the audience is invited to enjoy resenting, and the writing keeps feeding him lines designed to make that read worse, which is a strange thing to do to yourself week after week for more than a decade. It works because he never asks to be liked. The moment he did, the whole construction would collapse.

Film has been kinder to him as a supporting player than as a lead. He is Paul in How to Be Single, a senator in Fly Me to the Moon, Ben in the live-action Tom & Jerry, and a voice in The Bad Guys 2. He appears as himself often enough that the documentary credits are close to a category of their own. The Breadwinner, in 2026, gives him a named character rather than a version of himself, which will be the real test.