If his experience Wednesday night is any indication, it’s going to be a long summer for Bowen Yang.
Walking the red carpet in Orlando for the grand opening of Universal’s Epic Universe, Yang was peppered with questions about his emotional embrace with Sarah Sherman during goodnights at this week’s SNL Season 50 finale, and what it all meant.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Yang acknowledged that he was emotional at goodnights. “I think you get to a point at SNL where you understand that you’re on the downswing of things,” he explained. “I think I was just processing that being one of the last ‘last nights’ that I would have, and that is a huge thing,”
“Every finale at goodnights something leaves my body because I’m just relieved from all that happened in that season and this was a big one,” Yang added. “We went through a lot, so many fun memories. I think that was probably what was registering. I was just like, oh, I need to savor these moments before I don’t have them anymore.”
Asked whether or not we should interpet that to mean he might not be returning for the show’s 51st season, Yang deflected the question, laughing as he responded, “No, we’re not doing that.”
Yang joined SNL‘s writing staff in 2018 and became a featured player a year later. Over his six seasons on the show, he’s earned three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, most recently last September.
Known for his wry yet absurdist comic sensibility, some of Yang’s memorable characters haven’t even been human—including The Spotted Laternfly, The Chinese Spy Balloon, The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic, Moo Deng, and George Santos (we kid).
A longtime co-host of the popular podcast Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers, Yang has also logged a number of TV roles outside the show over the years, appearing in Girls5Eva, The Other Two, and Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. His film roles include Fire Island and Bros, both released in 2022. This past year has seen his star burn even brighter, with prominent roles in the filmed adaptation of Wicked and the recently released Wedding Banquet remake.
Yang set tongues wagging in April when he hinted at a possible SNL departure in an interview with People magazine.
“SNL, it’s just this moving, living, breathing thing,” he said at the time. “New people come in and you do have to sort of make way for them to grow and to keep elevating themselves. And that inevitably requires me to sort of hang it up at some point—but I don’t know what the vision is yet.”
