After gaining national attention for her comedic tweets about the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones has been brought on as a commentator for the event from now until the conclusion of the competition; and that includes tonight. After all, tonight will be Jones’s breakout as a sports correspondent for NBC, Deadline reports, as the star whose celestial gravitas is only growing around the world shines some of her enthusiastic wit on a recap of today’s events.
The SNL cast member will be joining Ryan Seacrest on his early morning–or late night, depending on how you look at it–show NBC’s Olympic Late Night Show to go over what blew her away in the games and what fell flat. While Jones will not be starting out in the primetime slots that most Americans, in that squeeze period between getting home from work and sleeping for work the next day, would be watching, consider her humble beginnings in the Olympic-commentating world.
Earlier this week, despite her accomplishments and accolades in the circles of film and comedy, Leslie Jones was no more an NBC broadcaster for Rio than anyone else. Nestled on her couch, the Ghostbusters star fired tweet after tweet about her complete unbounded love for Team USA–and specifically the US team’s ability to snatch gold medal after gold medal. It didn’t take long for fans and newcomers alike to retweet and spread her genuine enthusiasm for her country’s top athletes.
Quickly, NBC took notice of the star’s unbridled patriotism and invited her down to Rio to speak on national TV about what went on that day for the Olympians. While doing exactly that was what Jones was accomplishing through Twitter (and these Olympics are getting better attention on the Internet than on traditional TV), the actress could not be more pumped about her new gig.
She spent most of today live-tweeting her newfound time on the ground, dubbing it “slay all day.” While the actress did unfortunately miss out on historic US swimming, with the end of Michael Phelps’s heavily-gilded career, Jones will get to (excitedly) comment on Simone Biles winning yet another gold medal, Usain Bolt’s step into the Rio spotlight, and Ryan Lochte, who was robbed at gunpoint today (to which his response was “whatever”).
Even if nothing at all had happened today in the Olympic games, it would all be an improvement of what Twitter had done to Leslie Jones a bit earlier this summer. After the debut of the Ghostbusters remake, which featured an all-female cast in which Jones was the only black woman, organized hate conglomerates on the social media site sent waves of attacks and threats towards the star’s way, which caused her to quit her beloved Twitter to avoid any more cruelty.
Now, Jones’s pure love for her American superstars through the media site that had caused her pain before is giving her a chance to happily express herself on the world stage once more.