Beck Bennett says that during his first year on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, he was repeatedly told—sometimes in “sh*ty” and “upsetting” ways—to trim down.
Bennett recounted the “frustrating” ordeal as a guest on Vulture’s Good One podcast (seen below).
During his freshman run on the iconic sketch comedy series, “I was told by many different people, in different ways—some s**ty ways”—to lose weight, Beckett shared.
As for the source of such guidance, “I’m keeping it vague on purpose,” Beckett made clear. But “there was definitely somebody, who I don’t think people would know, that handled it in ways that was upsetting and frustrating and hard, which probably made my second year even harder.”
Fortunately, Bennett added, there was another someone who framed the advice in a more constructive manner.
“There was somebody who put it to me in a way that kind of made it click,” he said. “Again, I don’t want to say that person’s name because asking somebody to lose weight is, you know, controversial. But it was put to me in a way where I was like, ‘Oh, that kind of makes sense.'”
How so? “It’s like you want to be comfortable. You want to be confident,” Bennett explained. “If I’m there to play these certain parts, I want to be able to be that person, to look like that person. That’s kind of the reality of of our business…. That’s kind of how it was put to me.”
Bennett best acted on the guidance with a role in How to Lose Weight in 4 Easy Steps, a short film he did with Conan O’Brien and a pre-Severance Britt Lower, between his second and third seasons on SNL. (“The third step is ‘Get your heart broken,'” he recalled.)
“This short came up and I was like, ‘Great, I’ll lose weight for this,’ and I lost like 30 pounds,” he said. “And then at that point I had a therapist and could start to level out a little bit.”
Bennett left SNL in May 2021, after an eight-season run. Most recently, he has guested on Apple TV’s Seth Rogen/Rose Byrne comedy Platonic, played a Daily Planet staffer in James Gunn’s Superman film, and just wrapped a two-week run in Broadway’s All Out comedy.
Watch Bennett discuss his SNL weight loss below:
“[Bennett] played a Daily News staffer in James Gunn’s Superman film”
I appreciate this site but this is the second head-scratching error I’ve come across in a couple of days. The Late Show’s host in 2018 was Stephen Colbert, not David Letterman, and the newspaper in the Superman film was/is even more famously The Daily Planet, not The Daily News.
My (egregious) Daily Planet error has been fixed.