If any of Saturday Night Live‘s (many) longtime cast members are leaving the show, it went unsaid on this week’s Season 50 finale.
Taken at face value, that would seem to suggest that none of this season’s rumored high-profile departures (Colin Jost, Michael Che, Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner, and Bowen Yang) are actually happening. After all, recent years have seen most longtime SNL cast members get loving farewell sketches.
The other possibility is that Lorne Michaels, as he’s been wont to do in the past, asked any cast members who might be planning to leave to hold off on making any announcements just yet—perhaps in hopes that given some time away from the weekly grind of the show, they’ll change their mind. (It’s happened before.)
If we’re to believe the latter, there were some signs that at least one high profile cast member intends to leave. That cast member is Bowen Yang, who got as close to a goodbye sketch as anyone Saturday night with “Bowen’s Still Straight,” a sequel to “Bowen’s Straight,” his much-talked about 2024 pretape with Sydney Sweeney.
That alone wouldn’t necessarily mean much—as one of the show’s biggest stars, it’s not unusual for Yang to be the focus of a sketch.
The goodnights, however, offered further hints that maybe Yang is in fact leaving. Though SNL‘s live broadcast cut out as host Scarlett Johansson was saying her goodnights, the show has since posted them in full to its social media accounts, where a tearful Yang and fellow cast member/good friend Sarah Sherman can be seen embracing for a full 20 seconds. Later, Yang and Ego Nwodim also share what looks to be a meaningful hug.
Thank you, Scarlett Johansson, Bad Bunny, Mike Myers, and RaiNao! Goodnight! pic.twitter.com/fTy9bl5fN9
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) May 18, 2025
Going into Saturday night’s finale, Yang seemed the least likely of the rumored cast departures. Though he set tongues wagging last month when he answered a question about leaving the show by allowing that he’d be doing so “at some point,” he later clarified that he had no imminent plans to leave the show.
Perhaps that’s still the case, and perhaps that hug—and the fact that Gardner, Day and Yang stood together at the top of goodnights with their arms around each other—is nothing more than good friends celebrating the end of momentous season.
Yep. The thing about Lorne asking people to hold off departure announcements makes sense. Honestly, I see all 5 of these people returning for season 51. Maybe some 1st-3rd year cast members could be cut instead.
“Weekly grind?”
They do 20 shows a year. I’d like to have a weekly grind like that at my job.
Each of those weeks they basically live at the office/studio Tuesday through Saturday. Then when they have consecutive weeks of shows, I can imagine that it’s a difficult work schedule to maintain.
Mike Meyers is getting downright handsome with age.