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“Saturday Night Live” hosts typically make their mark on the show, either by boosting the sketches they’re in with charm and good timing, or making a lesser kind of mark by awkwardly revealing why they aren’t right for live sketch comedy.

So what are we supposed to make of British actor Josh O’Connor, who hosted “SNL” for the first time and left almost no impression at all?

O’Connor, known for playing Prince Charles in “The Crown” and for performances in “Challengers” and the new Netflix movie, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” seemed game enough, but throughout most of the show, he had little opportunity to do much more than blend into sketches centered around characters he was not playing.

He played supporting parts including the Tin Man in a revamped “Wizard of Oz” sketch involving the male characters deciding they actually want a “big old thang” instead of their original wishes, a fellow student in a sketch about a 12-year-old college prodigy (Bowen Yang), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a Christmas characters piece that was a take on Variety’s “Actors on Actors,” and an awkward brunch attendee.

Only in a few sketches, including a “Dating Game” parody featuring Ashley Padilla as a rowdy 84-year-old contestant, a hospital sketch in which he played a bad intern, and one in which O’Connor and Ben Sherman played sensitive male strippers at a bachelorette party did he have lead roles. And they weren’t particularly memorable characters or portrayals. Only when he kissed fellow cast members at the end of sketches (Yang and Sherman) did things seem to liven up.

In fact, it felt more like a spotlight episode for Yang — who played the Wizard; the fast-talking, high-attitude Doctor Please in the hospital sketch; and the 12-year-old college student — and for musical guest Lily Allen. Allen’s scathing performances of “Sleepwalking” and “Madeline” from her new breakup-with-David Harbour album were high drama. The latter song featured a big surprise: actor Dakota Johnson spoke from behind a scrim as the titular character and then appeared next to Allen when the song ended. Another Allen song, “West End Girl,” was the subject of an entire brunch sketch in which cast members sang about their feelings to the tune of the music. Allen showed up as herself, but filling in as a waitress at their table.

It’s hard to say if the material just misfired for O’Connor or if he’s just an awkward fit for “SNL,” but unfortunately what stood out in the episode had little to do with him.

In addition to the sketches, this “SNL” episode included a Christmas-themed “Brad and His Dad” animated short.

Ready for another President Trump-centered cold open? Sorry, you got one anyway. James Austin Johnson once again aced his impression of Trump with a stream-of-conscious ramble for reporters aboard Air Force One that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (Ashley Padilla) attributed to exhaustion. “I took an Ambien and an Adderall, let’s see which one wins,” said Trump before inappropriately fixating on Leavitt’s lips and denying that affordability is a problem. “Economy is very strong,” he said, “from the billionaires all the way down to the poor millionaires.” Trump addressed attacks on Venezuelan ships, saying, “We’re doing pirate now, argh,” and promising that attacks would move from the sea to the air, leading to a visual joke of Santa Claus and his reindeer on radar being shot out of the sky.

O’Connor’s monologue focused on two things those unfamiliar with his acting should know about him: that he has a reputation as a “soft boy,” someone who embroiders, scrapbooks and gardens like an “average 65-year-old woman.” The other is that he resembles chef Linguini from the Pixar film “Ratatouille,” and though a rumor that he wanted to play the character in a live-action version was unfounded, he would very much like to play that character. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I would kill as Linguini.”

Best sketch of the night: You ate how many nuggets this year?

Even though it’s already well-trod meme material (including an almost identical comic strip’s premise), “SNL” was still able to squeeze some juice from Spotify’s Wrapped, a year-in-review feature, which returned for another round earlier in the week. Uber Eats has a year-in-review, too, and you absolutely don’t want your significant other to see what fast food you’ve ordered and whether you’re in the top 1% of nugget eaters. If your Uber Eats age is “52 and Fat,” it may not be knowledge you wish to have. The mock commercial does a great job balancing the shame we feel about the awful foods we eat with the amount of data we could learn about those habits, if only anyone ever wanted to see that.

Also good: These kind male strippers give the best empathy hugs

A bachelorette party at a cozy cabin is interrupted by two hired male strippers, Augie and Remington (Sherman and O’Connor), who ask for consent before entering and are soon removing their cardigans to reveal another layer of cardigan. The men dance to an emo version of “Pony” before revealing that one of them has a Zohran (Mamdani) tattoo on his stomach. They give lap dances, but one of them gets overstimulated and cries. “I was just thinking about the Supreme Court,” he moans. Not the most original sketch idea, but the specific details of the characters and Padilla’s smitten reactions as the bachelorette saved the sketch from overstaying its welcome.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Superheroes, Santa and your boss all want you to behave

Jane Wickline did a nice job with a surprisingly violent original song about stopping the biggest threat facing the world: not AI, but the grown-up child actors from “Stranger Things.” But it was Marcello Hernández who got big laughs recounting what Christmas is like for his Cuban family. It includes dealing with new boyfriends of family members pretending to be who they aren’t. “You don’t like the food, Kyle, you like having sex with my cousin!” Hernández wandered a bit, straying to talk about “Home Alone” and uncles who give unsolicited sex advice, but the heart of the segment was impressions of his father calling to encourage his son as different characters including Santa Claus, Spider-Man and his boss, Lorne Michaels.

TV legend Bryan Fuller, known for his cult classics “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal,” just earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for first feature. It’s somehow a surprise that the well-known creator just directed his first movie, after spending almost three decades working in television on series like “Dead Like Me” and “American Gods.” Now he turns to the world of indie film, reuniting with actor Mads Mikkelsen, his Hannibal Lecter, on the dark fairy tale “Dust Bunny.”

Fuller has a thing for idioms, extending them to their most extreme ends (e.g., “pushing daisies”), and so in “Dust Bunny,” he imagines what those bits of fluff could be if our nightmares came to life. He also posits an outlandish notion: What if a kid hired an assassin to kill the monster under her bed?

Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is an imaginative young girl who hears things that roar and scream in the night. The dust bunny under her bed is a ravenous, monstrous thing. When her parents go missing, she’s convinced they’ve been eaten by the monster bunny, and seeks out the services of an “intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen, that’s how he’s credited) whom she has seen vanquishing dragons in the alley outside. With a fee that she purloins from a church collection plate, she implores him for help and he agrees, as he learns more about this young girl’s challenging childhood.

At first, “Dust Bunny” feels a little light, the story skittering across its densely designed surface, with very little dialogue in the first half. But it grows and grows, more bits and pieces accumulating as Fuller reveals this strange, heightened world. We meet Intriguing Neighbor’s handler, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), revealing the larger Wickian world of killers that he inhabits.Weaver chomps through her scenes like the monster bunny chomps through the floorboards — literally, as she consumes charcuterie, dumplings and “suckling pig tea sandwiches” with gusto. Some monsters grin at us from across the table.

The film is essentially “Leon: The Professional” meets “Amélie” (one of Fuller’s favorite films), but with his distinct wit and flair. That style also means that “Dust Bunny” is quite fussy and mannered and if you don’t buy in on the film’s arch humor and stylized world, you’re liable to bounce right off of it. As Fuller opens the world up, revealing a sly FBI agent (Sheila Atim) and more baddies (David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson), the plot becomes more intriguing beyond its unwieldy childhood-trauma metaphor, but there’s also not quite enough embroidered on this tapestry. It feels shallow, not fleshed out.

Fuller demonstrates a strong command over his visual domain but the pat allegory he presents about the monsters with whom we have to learn to live feels a bit muddled. Sloan and Mikkelsen are terrific together, but you feel that there is much more they could have sunk their teeth into here, and perhaps the limits of the tale reveal the limits of the budget, carefully wallpapered over with opulent production design — explosions of patterns and color crafted by Jeremy Reed, captured with shadowy but lush cinematography by Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.

It’s a first feature that feels like one — a bit of a surprise from someone so experienced. But the project has Fuller’s signature style, even if it doesn’t add up to much more than a neat kiddie-centric hard-R genre exercise.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.