Saturday Night Live is adding two new featured players for Season 52, with Saidah Belo-Osagie and Grace Reiter joining the cast ahead of the show’s Sept. 26 premiere.
Both performers were among the comedians who screen-tested for the show in late August after SNL held casting showcases in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Belo-Osagie is a New York-based Nigerian-American comedian, actor, and writer whose work draws heavily on character comedy. She’s best known in the New York comedy scene for hosting UNSCRIPTED, a reality-TV-parody variety show at Brooklyn’s Union Hall, and creating the one woman show, Saidah Gets Closure.
Reiter, meanwhile, arrives at SNL with a sizable online following. The 25-year-old Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin native first gained attention producing her own online sketches before joining American High’s digital sketch-comedy ensemble, where she became a familiar face in American High Shorts and College Life. Her social-media following now numbers in the millions.
She has also been moving increasingly into traditional film, television, and stage work. Reiter appeared in Chelsea Peretti’s First Time Female Director and the Hulu movies Prom Dates and Summer of 69, and played Tara on Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s HBO comedy The Chair Company. Last year, she made her Off-Broadway debut playing multiple roles in Ginger Twinsies, the Parent Trap parody that ran at the Orpheum Theatre.
Reiter’s road to SNL has also been unusually public. She participated in the show’s casting showcases before this year, and in a September 2025 interview with Elite Daily, she named landing a spot on Saturday Night Live as one of her career dreams.
“We will see,” she said at the time. “It is all up to powers outside of my control.”
Belo-Osagie and Reiter effectively replace the two cast members who departed over the past year. Bowen Yang left midway through Season 51 after seven-and-a-half seasons, while Chloe Fineman announced in July that she was departing after seven seasons.
LateNighter understands that there will be no additional cast departures ahead of the new season, with all five featured players added last year—Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Ben Marshall, Kam Patterson, and Veronika Slowikowska—poised to return. Jane Wickline and Ashley Padilla, who both joined the show at the start of Season 50, have been promoted to repertory player status.
Assuming that number holds, it will leave SNL with 17 cast members to begin Season 52, the same number it actually carried into last season’s premiere after Ego Nwodim’s late departure.
The additions also shift the makeup of the ensemble. Belo-Osagie becomes the show’s first Black female cast member since Nwodim’s exit, while the overall gender split moves from five women and 12 men at the start of Season 51 to six women and 11 men this fall.
SNL returns for Season 52 on Sept. 26, with host Jalen Brunson and musical guest KATSEYE.
