Saturday Night Live alum Beck Bennett is coming clean about the show’s famously difficult work environment.
During Bennett’s second season in 2014, the actor was told by “many different people” to lose weight.
“I was told by many different people in different ways, some s----y ways,” Bennett, 41, said on Vulture’s Good One podcast.
“I’m keeping it vague on purpose, because there was definitely somebody, who I don’t think people would know, that handled it in ways that were upsetting and frustrating and hard,” Bennett told host Jesse David Fox, “which probably made my second year even harder.”
Specifying that it was somebody whom people wouldn’t know seemed to be Bennett’s way of exonerating his former boss, Lorne Michaels.
At the end of Season 40, Bennett’s second year on the show, he took on a role in the short film that helped him lose more than 30 pounds before the new season began filming. The film, How To Lose Weight In 4 Easy Steps!, required Bennett to do the physical transformation himself.
“This short came up, and so I was like, ‘Great, I’ll lose weight for this short.’ And I lost like 30 pounds in between season two and three, and then at that point I had a therapist and could kind of start to level out a little bit,” the eight-season SNL veteran said.
Bennett says he understood the importance of maintaining his fitness when his coworker explained how it restricted his casting potential.
“You want to be comfortable. You want to be confident,” Bennett said. “If I’m there to play these certain parts, I want to be able to be that person to look like that person. That’s kind of the reality of our business.”
Over time, Bennett says, the potential to cast against body type has shifted.
“It changes a lot. There are different body types playing different parts that they haven’t been able to play for a while, which is great,” he added.
Bennett left SNL in 2021 after eight seasons to pursue other projects and move to Los Angeles with his family.
He currently hosts a podcast, What’s Our Podcast?, with fellow SNL alum Kyle Mooney. They both joined SNL in 2013, following the success of their sketch comedy group, Good Neighbor.
