Bill Hader as Julian Assange on Saturday Night Live
SNL re-imagines Julian Assange as Harvey Levin and after the cablegate leaks, NewsFeed doesn’t think they’re that off base.
There’s no doubt that the diplomatic cables that Assange’s organization, WikiLeaks, released have made major waves in the diplomatic world (and effectively reduced many diplomatic relationships to a few snide comments). But after learning the secret opinions and conversations of many U.S. diplomats, NewsFeed isn’t alone in being reminded of the movie Mean Girls and the back-stabbing, petty gossip that exists in high school. Which, judging from the cables, also exists in foreign diplomacy.
(See photos of the history of SNL movies.)
But Saturday Night Live took it one step further and imagined the damage Assange could do to political leaders’ reputations if he took a more Levin-esque approach.
(See TIME’s exclusive video interview with Julian Assange.)
From a compromising video of Hillary Clinton getting out of an SUV (a la Britney Spears) to catching Qaddafi and his, um, nurse exiting a restaurant, SNL demonstrates what the next big leak would look like if Assange went full-on Hollywood gossip. And the result is pure hilarity.