Kate McKinnon Isn’t the Only ‘SNL’ Cast Member to Leave Due to Exhaustion
Saturday Night Live cast member Kate McKinnon recently revealed that she left SNL due in part to pure exhaustion, sharing “My body was tired.”
McKinnon opened up about her departure on the morning talk show Live With Kelly and Ryan, admitting the decision to leave was not easy. McKinnon wasn’t the only cast member to depart SNL last season. Pete Davidson, Kyle Mooney, and Aidy Bryant also left the show. Bryant revealed she had somewhat similar reasons for leaving SNL, sharing that she would have left sooner if it weren’t for the coronavirus (Covid-19).
Why did Aidy Bryant leave ‘SNL’ alongside Kate McKinnon?
Bryant stayed on SNL until she felt she could finish her tenure with one last “normal” season. “If it weren’t for Covid, I probably would have left a few years earlier,” she told Variety. “But it was such a huge change. When Covid hit, it was so jarring that we were all like, ‘I’m definitely going to come back next year.'”
“And then I had to shoot Shrill for half of last season, and so I missed a lot,” she reflected on trying to balance SNL and shooting another series. “And then it was like, ‘Well, now I should go back one more.’ I kept trying to seek one last normal year. This year wasn’t the normal year that I hoped for, but it was closer to that. It was like, ‘OK, it’s really time now.’ And 10 felt like a nice, solid round number.”
Both Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon describe being exhausted after ‘SNL’
Like McKinnon, Bryant said she was exhausted from the rigorous demands placed on SNL cast members. “The SNL schedule is a whopper,” she admitted to Variety. “I pitched, developed and made three seasons of a show [Shrill] that I’m super proud of, but there’s a part of me that wonders what it would have been if I didn’t have to split my time like that.”
She described burning the candle at both ends and being unable to find balance. “Those years, it wasn’t uncommon for me to work a 12-hour day on Shrill and then continue to work all day at SNL — and all night!” Bryant exclaimed. “So it would be a 22-hour day. I can’t do that anymore. Maybe I could in my 20s. But now I’m in my 30s, and I’m like, ‘That’s a wrap on those days.’”
McKinnon described feeling burned out. “I thought about it for a very long time, and it was very, very hard,” she said about planning her SNL departure (via NME). “All I ever wanted to do in my whole life was be on Saturday Night Live. So, I did, I loved it, I had the best decade, and then I was just like, my body was tired, and I felt like it was time.”
Have other ‘SNL’ cast members left for personal reasons?
Some SNL cast members leave the series to focus on their careers in film or TV. But others like Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant leave for personal reasons. For example, Molly Shannon, who continued her career in film and TV post-SNL, also departed the sketch series for personal reasons.
“When I left, I wasn’t leaving to go do something else,” she told Collider. “I was just leaving because I wanted to spend more time with my dad, and I wanted to have kids, and date more. And I just wanted to have personal time. So I wasn’t leaving to have some plan to go somewhere. I just wasn’t at all.”
