Saturday Night Live turned 50 last year and a lot of former cast members and major celebrities joined in the season long celebration, but it's a new year and it's time to get back to business.
Which, with SNL, usually means some cast changes—out with the old (and sometimes not so old) and in with the new. Show creator and producer Lorne Michaels recently announced SNL would return on October 4 with a literal handful—five—cast changes.
Five members of the 50th season cast are departing and five new featured players are being added.
Over the summer, the departures of Heidi Gardner, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim, Devon Walker, and most recently Ego Nwodim became the largest cast turnover since 2022, when eight performers left.
Attending the Emmy Awards on Sunday, where the "SNL50" special picked up another statuette for Michaels' collection, the show's executive producer addressed the most recent cast shakeup.
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Michaels told Entertainment Tonight on the red carpet:
"The show has always brought people in from different ages and different generations and it’s how it revives itself."
"It’s always hard when people leave, but there’s a time for that and our audience has always stayed relatively young, and more so now with TikTok."
"Change is good. The people we’re bringing in, I’m really excited about."
SNL newbies are aghast, but people familiar with the show aren't surprised when cast changes are announced.
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Cast changes after every season have been a hallmark of SNL over the past 50 years.
Some performers left for film or other television work, which had gutted the original cast by 1980 when the last four original Not Ready for Prime Time Players—Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner (along with season two addition Bill Murray)—all left the show.
Others fell victim to budget cuts, just weren't a good fit for the show, or were casualties of the decision to regroup and rebrand again, and they exited SNL earlier than they wanted.
In the Michaels' biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, Susan Morrison wrote:
"The cryptic hiring protocols extend to staying hired. Cast and writers are supposed to be notified by July about whether they are being asked back. (Michaels has a rule about not making big decisions in June, when he is sick of everyone, and exhausted.)"
"That date often slips by, with people not knowing their fates until Labor Day, a month before the season premiere."
The season 11 premiere in 1985 saw an entirely new cast, but the next season began with most of that cast pruned.
Among those let go in 1986 were Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall, Randy Quaid, Terry Sweeney—the show's first openly LGBTQ+ cast member, and Damon Wayans. Clearly there's life, and a career, after getting the SNL axe.
Since SNL's debut in 1975, there have been 172 cast members.
Considering the internet and apps didn't exist when the show premiered, casting has evolved over time as well. The new additions for season 51—Ben Marshall, Tommy Brennan, Kam Patterson, Veronika Slowikowska, and Jeremy Culhane—are from the SNL writers room, the stand-up stage, and... TikTok.
