TIME’S UP

‘SNL’ Star Reveals Why She Was Happy to Be Fired

The comedian said that she was glad she no longer had to be nice to people who were mean to her behind the scenes.

Saturday Night Live star Chloe Troast is happy to be free from the “dread and anxiety” of working on the show.

Troast, 29, made it just one season before she was let go following Season 49. During an appearance on the But Also With Michael And Asher podcast, she said behind-the-scenes “comments” colored her experience negatively. “It changed the place for me entirely,” she said.

“And there was a deep sense of dread and anxiety thinking that I would have to step back in that workplace and engage with the same people that I now had a completely different relationship with,” Troast added.

“Because of the comments [and] because I actually realized how it worked in that time, where I went like, ‘Dang, this is just hard to be in this environment.’”

Troast broke out with the “Little Orphan Cassidy” sketch, in which she played an unadoptable 27-year-old orphan. She was often used in the season’s musical numbers, including when she portrayed Mama Cass Elliot in the “Make Your Own Kind of Music” sketch and sang in the “Get That Boy Back” country music video parody.

The comedian said being fired from the series made her feel “relieved.”

“There was a type of psychic experience of when something like that happens, and you go like, ‘They’re not gonna take me back.’ Or like, ‘I’m getting fired,’ or whatever, and then when it does happen, you’re like, ‘I knew it,’” she explained. “And there’s some type of relief in that.”

At the time, her apprehension about being fired was compounded by the tension offscreen, she added.

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“Definitely, when I finally got that piece of news, I was relieved to know that I wouldn’t then have to walk into a place that I was now deeply scared of… I was like, ‘OK, alright, well, now I know I don’t have to be randomly nice to people that I think are quite mean,’ or stuff like that.”

Troast said things have looked up since, as she realized she’d made genuine connections on the show once her time there was done.

She said that after she was fired she “got this like influx of calls from everyone inside.”

“That was amazing of just… it almost made a lot of us closer, at least for me, my relationship to them [was] closer because they were so kind and supportive and had my back and wanted to see me, wanted to hang out, wanted to do shows, like same old, same old in that way.”

Professionally, the comedian’s star continued to rise in the aftermath, as she appeared alongside Tina Fey in The Four Seasons and also landed roles in other major comedies, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins and Adults. She also guest-starred in the crime thriller Furious.

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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