Ego Nwodim Teases Leaving ‘Saturday Night Live’

AddBowen Yang who are teasing that they might be ready to hang up their Saturday Night Live costumes for good.

“I want to create something that feels like it's mine,” Nwodim told Gold Derby at a For Your Consideration event. “I want to showcase some of my other talents, now that I've done so much on the show and I have so much fun with my castmates and have really gotten to stretch and be challenged in the best of ways.”

Sounds like a resignation letter, but Nwodim played coy about whether or not she was actually out the door. “I love the show, so there's no telling what happens there or doesn’t,” she continued. “I do know I feel like I've built some muscle that I want to flex in other spaces as well, so hopefully I get to broaden my horizons in that way.”

The should-I-stay-or-should-I-go dance is consistent with other remarks Nwodim has made since the end of SNL’s fiftieth season. “We like to keep things mysterious around here,” she said a few weeks ago. “That’s part of the allure of SNL, we don’t know what’s going to happen week to week, let alone in the fall, so who knows.”

Will Nwodim actually head out the door? She’s seven seasons in — in decades past, that would be considered the perfect time to move on to bigger and better things. But with comedy movies and streaming sitcoms no longer the obvious next step for SNL stars, is now the time to go? Season 50 was probably Nwodim’s most successful yet, with breakout characters like Miss Eggy. If other cast leave, as expected, this could be her SNL time to shine. 

At the same event, Bowen Yang shared that several cast are considering their post-Saturday Night Live futures. “This is kind of what everyone's negotiating — it's not just me,” Yang said. “We're all having these conversations, people who are sort of reaching a certain point where we're like, ‘Oh.’ This is a moment where we did not ever expect, we never saw.  We never had the prescience or the foresight to look past the 50th — ‘I got the dream job and I stuck around for the 50th anniversary.’” Now that the 50th birthday party is in the rearview mirror, he said, “I think we're all kind of assessing.”

Chloe Fineman and Heidi Gardner also contemplated their futures, though they were less on the nose about their eventual departures. “I think my dream is to be in a comedy that is in a theater,” said Fineman, “and that’s hard to come by these days.”

“I'm just like, ‘Nothing is ever on our timeline,’” said the philosophical Gardner. “And I think I'm looking for open doors.”