Who would have guessed that the biggest water-cooler moment of the first night of Coachella 2026 wouldn’t be a musical cameo or a particularly inspiring moment from one of the evening’s headliners, but rather… a seven-minute monologue by a famous Hollywood actress in her late ’70s? Talk about stunt casting in the most unexpected way. Susan Sarandon was brought in to play an older version of Sabrina Carpenter in the middle of that pop superstar’s set. No matter what else happens over the weekend, it will surely be the festival’s most shocking, polarizing, criticized or hated moment… though “moment” may be too mild a word for an epic scene that its critics thought would forever be shamed.
This couldn’t have seemed 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 amusing tradition. Amidst the nonstop choreography and joking, things suddenly got into real seriousness for seven minutes — as if Carpenter was outsourcing the depth of the set to Sarandon. The actress sat in a car at a makeshift drive-in set up in the middle of the main stage arena, her hair blowing in the desert wind as she reminisced sometime in the future about what it was like to once be Pop Tart Sabrina Carpenter, with plenty of thoughtfulness about fame and family and the pros and cons of constantly showing positivity.
As it progressed the questions increased. Why leave such a cool sequence out of a performance whose other cameos – by Will Ferrell (also live) and by Samuel Jackson Jr. and Sam Neill (pre-recorded) – leaned toward pure entertainment? Who wrote this soliloquy? Was it all scripted, or partially improvised? Was it intended to last this long? And if we complain about such an unusual disruption to an otherwise pretty pro-forma pop festival are we looking like a horse being offered a gift?
Well, that last question is mine, and probably only mine. When it comes to getting an appreciative kick from Sarandon’s cameo, which I’ve now seen again a few times in bootleg clips, I’m clearly in the minority. (Coachella is very good at quickly deleting anything home viewers might try to post to social media from the livestream, but it’s out there.) Diversity“The scene, a tangled reflection on wish fulfillment, brought the pop show to an abrupt halt,” it said in its recap of Late Friday Night. I would probably have to agree that it did, or at least brought it to this point… but is that necessarily a bad thing? Is speed everything in pop music too? You could argue that’s a lot. But I’m also a fan of those outwardly dynamic moments, where something that’s supposed to be about escapism tries to be real for a minute — even if, at this point in her career and personality, Carpenter felt forced to employ someone to suggest that she might someday hope to be fully mature for us.
I’m also fascinated by the idea that this whole incident may have been partly an accident. Sources on the ground at Coachella indicated that the monologue was originally supposed to be shorter, and Sarandon was asked to extend it to cover a change that was taking longer than expected. This has not been confirmed, and there was nothing about Carpenter’s later costume that suggested it should have taken seven minutes to create on its own. But the actress didn’t appear to be reading from a prompter, and if indeed she was making it up as she went along, it was a very good example of the older actors practicing improvisation. Did Carpenter write the whole thing about the (obviously) fake sister and niece, or was Sarandon freestyling some of it? The fact that we’re even thinking about it makes it at least as much fun as the old-school song-and-dance of big production numbers, if you like taking that kind of risk that may or may not derail a little.
And regardless of whether or not the whole thing was 100% pre-scripted, it made for an amusing punchline to have his “Girls Meets World” co-star Corey Fogelmanis show up as a carhop at the end, getting caught up in the minutiae of closing tabs and tapping credit cards, taking the piss out of the monologue’s philosophizing. how good it is from above key The casting was: Who could have been a better (or more ambitious) choice to play a carpenter with a few more decades of experience?
Hate to read too much into any of this. During the livestream you only had to go to the It’s less likely that the singer will bring her idol to the program to make a statement on the Middle East or even show-business blackballing than it is that she really likes “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” But, regardless of what you think of anyone’s latter-day politics, Carpenter has a good taste for screen sirens.
There’s no doubt that the “Auntie Sabrina” interlude will be looked upon by many as an example of how to misdirect a show. But perhaps we’d be better off if more pop stars thought of more ways to incorporate quietly interesting and unexpected things into their shows, even at the risk of leaving audiences scratching their heads for a minute. Or, of course, seven. Attention, Addison Rae – although you might want to play it safe and only include Helen Mirren or Sally Field Mini-Monologue.
