Saturday Night Live alum Heidi Gardner weighed in on the debate about whether the show’s stars should “break” during sketches.
Gardner, who was on the show’s cast for eight seasons before she was shockingly axed following the show’s Season 50, said she has no regrets about not being able to hold her laughter in some sketches, despite criticism—and she doesn’t believe Ryan Gosling should either.
“I think I, for myself, just really had this self-imposed rule where I was like, ‘You can’t break, you can’t break,’” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I think I just took it too seriously. I was like, ‘You can’t break until you really break, or you earn it.’”
Gardner said she realized later that the audience “loves when people break,” adding, “It’s fun. I love when people break. I don’t know why I was so hard on myself.”
According to other show alums, keeping a straight face during sketches isn’t only a self-imposed rule. SNL boss Lorne Michaels allegedly “hates it” when people break—though he seems to have made an exception for Gosling, who’s made a frequent habit of it in his four times hosting the show.
“Good on Ryan for being himself, and being real, because I think that he just thinks it’s really funny, and all the stuff he’s doing is funny,” Gardner said.
Gosling and the Season 51 cast members laughed frequently throughout his episode, particularly during the “Passing Notes” sketch, in which Gosling and Ashley Padilla’s prop notes were changed at the last minute as a prank. Others don’t look on it as kindly as Gardner now does.
SNL legend Kevin Nealon ripped the cast after watching the episode. “I never broke character on SNL,” he wrote on X. “I knew how much time the writers put into those scripts. You don’t want to be the one who throws it off,” he continued in his post. “Lorne doesn’t like when the cast breaks. Even if the audience laughs, it doesn’t work for the sketch.”
Nealon isn’t the only SNL cast member who doesn’t find such moments “cute.” Frequent former cast member offender Jimmy Fallon was blasted by his fellow castmate Tracy Morgan in 2007, when Morgan recalled telling Fallon to stop “doing that s--t in my sketches.”
Gardner said she still wishes she hadn’t taken the directive so seriously while on the show.
“Anything that I was scared of” about breaking, “there were no punishments for being myself and being real,” she told the site. The fan-favorite comedian memorably broke while performing in the “Beavis and Butt-Head” sketch in 2024, when she turned around mid-sketch and saw Day’s outlandish makeup for the first time.
“I like that the person that made me break was Mikey Day, who feels like a brother to me,” she said. “It felt like a very personal at-home moment, like when you’re a kid, and your brother makes you laugh, but you’re trying to do something serious, like talk on the phone with someone, and your brother’s in the background doing something, and you’re like, ‘Shut up, stop.’”
She added, “I just like that when I broke, I got to have that feeling of like, ‘Oh, that’s like my brother annoying me.’ It was very real for me.”
