Saturday Night Live’s latest shock departure, Bowen Yang, is coming clean about what’s “honestly behind” his choice to leave the show.
Yang, 35, discussed the big move on a special episode of his Las Culturistas podcast on Wednesday. “Well, this is the thing. This is honestly what’s behind it. It’s like, it’s time,” he said.
Cast members typically “would do seven seasons, and then you would scoot,” Yang, who ended up staying for seven and a half, explained.
“I have this very beautiful thing where I get to say that I stayed on exactly as long as I wanted to,” he added. “Maybe unsure—and I’ve said this before—I was maybe unsure about going back in the summer, and I’m so glad I did.”
Yang joined the show as a writer in 2018 and was added to the cast in 2019. He confirmed reports of his departure just days before his last episode, becoming one of only a handful of SNL alums to leave the show midseason.
“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready, but s--t, I hope I am,” he wrote to Instagram announcing his exit, “I loved working at SNL, and most of all I loved the people.”
Yang performed his last show as a cast member on the show’s Christmas episode, which was hosted by his friend and Wicked co-star Ariana Grande, with Cher as the musical guest.
Yang acknowledged that his exit feels surprising to fans, but argued that it shouldn’t be.
“COVID and the current media landscape, the current entertainment ecosystem is so turbulent that people have completely valid reasons for staying longer, or in a lot of cases, don’t have the privilege of staying on as long as they would like to,” he said.
The departure comes after several other surprise exits, including those of veterans Ego Nwodim and Heidi Gardner, after the series’ 50th anniversary.
Yang said he was “completely zen” about show boss Lorne Michaels’ casting refresh, as cast members and fans waited to hear who would be invited back for Season 51. Ultimately, the shakeup resulted in the axings of Devon Walker, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim, and—presumably—Gardner, who has yet to say whether she left on her own accord.
Speculating that he could have somehow been on the chopping block too, Yang said he was fine “either way” while awaiting Michaels’ decision. But “I’m so grateful I went back,” he added.
Yang summed up his experience at SNL as “suffering to the point of having to arrive at a nihilism, and then you create your own meaning from there,” before he opined that now, “The pull quote is going to be like, ‘Bowen Yang calls SNL suffering.’”
He explained, “There’s a collectivism there, but there’s an individualism in terms of everyone is on their own journey there. Everyone has a different length of their tenure, a completely different struggle.”
“I’ve learned how to work under what seems like an immense amount of pressure, which it kind of is. And it kind of isn’t,” he said. “But it’s like, I’ve learned so many things that have applied to so many other things… You have an idea on Tuesday, and it could be on TV by Saturday. It doesn’t work like that anywhere else. It’s a dream factory.”
