Dakota Johnson was a surprise guest as she took on the titular role of the mistress in “Madeline” when Lily Allen performed the song on Saturday Night Live.
Allen’s recent albumWest End Girl, has been widely reported to refer to the circumstances around her divorce from Stranger Things star David Harbour.
On the songs “Tennis” and “Madeline”, Allen namechecks a woman named Madeline. She interrogates the woman after seeing a text message from her appear on her partner’s phone.
During the SNL performance, Johnson performed the spoken-word responses that Allen receives from the character.
The Materialists actor was mostly obscured by gauze during the song, but appeared at the conclusion to embrace Allen and kiss her on the cheek.
Speaking to The Times earlier this year, Allen said that Madeline was “a fictional character”. When asked if she was a “construct of others”, Allen said: “Yes”.
Allen has described the album more generally as “a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be”.
Earlier in last night’s SNL episode, Allen performed another West End Girl track “Sleepwalking”. Allen has said that she wrote the album in just 10 days, last December, when she was “really depressed”.
“I thought I didn’t have any good songs left,” she explained. “My writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’”
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The record has been rapturously received by critics, earning a five-star review from The Independent’s Hannah Ewens.
The Independent rated West End Girl as the third best album of 2025, with Ewens writing: “When I first heard this blistering album from the sharp-tongued British star, the world around me disappeared. I was no longer hunched behind a laptop in an office block in London but whirling around Manhattan in a paranoid frenzy, scouring my husband’s phone, discovering hundreds of Trojans.
“My hands moved unconsciously to Google what a dojo is. We were all sucked into the revenge drama; fictional or otherwise, this is the post-breakup fantasy everyone has had at some point.
“To release a piece of confessional art detailing every hurt – and it actually being good? Delicious. I gave West End Girl five stars for the nerve, lyricism and execution but I didn’t anticipate listening to it so much.
“Or that ‘Pussy Palace’, the greatest earworm on the record, reserved brutally for revealing the speaker’s ex’s dirty deeds, would be stuck in my head for the remainder of the year. Dating artists should come with a waiver.”
