Ryan Gosling is still a man on a mission in Papyrus 2.
In the original 2017 skit on Saturday Night Live, Gosling played a font aficionado who can’t seem to come to terms with the Avatar title font being Papyrus.
On April 13, Gosling, 43, reprised his role as a crazed man going mad over the stylistic choice, in a longer sequel, whose description reads, “After spending years to work past it, Steven (Gosling) is confronted by the very thing he’s been trying to avoid.”
The new skit opens with Steven coming “face to face with my demons” after years of healing, when he sees a clip from 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water while getting a dental cleaning — with an updated title design.
“Not a huge improvement, but it made me feel like there was hope in the world,” Steven says in a voiceover. “Like maybe, if we raise our voice, change can happen.”
But even the change soon plagues Steven, who begins fervently attempting to crack the code of exactly what has been updated.
“All the money in the world, and he just put it … in bold,” he says of designer Jacob Crone. “It took him seconds — a minute, tops.”
Steven soon tracks down Crone, who learns a deep secret about the font enthusiast — to some hilariously emotional results.
Many fans of SNL and Gosling were overjoyed seeing the Barbie star again playing an individual who can’t wrap his head around Avatar director James Cameron’s decision to use the relatively common letter style, which has been a default font on computers since the release of Microsoft Office 97.
“He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the dropdown menu and he just randomly selected Papyrus,” Gosling’s Steven told a therapist in the original skit. “Like a thoughtless child, just wandering by a garden, just yanking leaves along the way … “
In conversation with PEOPLE this past December amid the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release of the Titanic 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, Cameron, 69, admitted that “the font thing’s funny.”
“We actually now had a dilemma on movie two. It’s like, ‘Are we going to keep the same font, the highest-grossing film in history, or are we going to change it?’ Mess with the formula,” he joked.
“It’s like, ‘F— it, we’re using the font.’ If Ryan gets his panties in a bunch over it, then so be it,” Cameron quipped in addition.
Despite the jokes made about his film’s logo, Cameron still maintained, “I love Saturday Night Live.”
“You’ve got to be able to laugh with and at yourself on Saturday Night Live,” the Academy Award winner continued. “They had me light a cigar off a hundred-dollar bill after Titanic became the highest-grossing film in history. First of all, I don’t smoke cigars … and I’d never light a hundred-dollar bill on fire. It’d be a bad thing for my kids to see, but it’s funny.”