Who could’ve guessed that the biggest water-cooler moment from night 1 of Coachella 2026 would not be a musical cameo or a particularly galvanizing moment from one of the evening’s headliners, but… a seven-minute monologue by a legendary Hollywood actress in her late 70s? Talk about stunt casting at its most unexpected. Susan Sarandon was brought in to play an elder version of Sabrina Carpenter, midway through that pop superstar’s set. Whatever else may transpire over the weekend, this will surely stand as the festival’s most puzzling, polarizing, dig-it-or-hate-it moment… although “moment” may be too modest a word for an epic scene that its detractors felt seemed to go on just shy of forever.

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It couldn’t have seemed much 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 entertaining custom. Amid the nonstop choreography and gags, suddenly things came to a crawl for seven minutes of actual seriousness — as if Carpenter were outsourcing the depth of the set to Sarandon. The actress sat in a car in a makeshift drive-in that was set up in........

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