There’s no question Saturday Night Live is famous for its laughs, but behind the scenes, it sounds like the mood hasn’t always been so funny.
Heidi Gardner just broke her silence about her exit from the long-running sketch show. The former cast member got real on the podcast of another former cast member this week. That would be fellow ex-SNL star Ego Nwodim’s Thanks Dad podcast, where the late-night duo got very chatty and candid.
On the pod, the 42-year-old Gardner opened up with emotion about her eight-year stint on SNL. The Missouri-born comedian first joined the cast in 2017 and became a fan favorite thanks to her hilarious Weekend Update character Bailey Gismert. She would later go on to star in all-time LOL sketches like Big Dumb Cups and the one where Ryan Gosling played Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head. But it wasn’t all good times!
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She told Nwodim on the pod:
“I am so honored that we worked so hard there, and then we also worked on our friendship so hard, which wasn’t hard, by the way. We’re humans, so we have egos, we want things for ourselves, we want to succeed, and there weren’t a lot of times when we were able to succeed in the way we wanted at the exact same time.”
Tearful and noticeably emotional, Gardner admitted she was “being really vulnerable” in even just talking about it.
Of course, fans and those close to the show alike have been buzzing for weeks about what has gone down in Lorne Michaels’ latest shakeup — a season 51 cast purge that saw not just Gardner and Nwodim leave, but also Devon Walker and Michael Longfellow moving suddenly out the door.
And it sounds like there were moments of envy in Heidi’s super-honest podcast pontification, too. Gardner confessed to feeling pangs of jealousy when her close friend Nwodim got a huge spotlight moment in April during Jack Black’s guest-hosting episode — a major fan-favorite show which Gardner admired deeply. She said:
“There’s a part of me, like if I think about it, I’m like, ‘wait, but I should want that for me.’ But you had it and it was f**king awesome.”
Nwodim totally got it, responding with honesty about how tough it was to navigate the show’s ultra-competitive atmosphere:
“It’s so easy to be caught up with your own stuff at SNL, and what you’re getting on and what you’re not getting on, and how you’re succeeding and how you wish you were doing better, or how I want what that person has. I remember so many times being like, why can’t we be able to be winning together at the same time, so it could feel like full celebration and not one of us mourning or frustrated and one of us like on cloud nine.”
If that doesn’t sound like the most relatable work confession ever, we don’t know what does. SNL is legendary, of course, but fame clearly doesn’t come without its share of exhaustion and competition.
Nevertheless, Nwodim has nothing but love for her former co-star, and the podcast host ended the conversation on a touching note that’s sure to make longtime fans emotional at her honesty about how “challenging” a workplace it can be:
“The sketches, they come, they go, they’re really fun. They can be hard, they can be things you’re not into, whatever. But I’m like, in a place where it can get so competitive and you can become so self involved, if you can leave and be still remarkably lovely and such a light and still pouring into other people like you, I think you succeeded. You were just such a light in what can be such a challenging place.”
Aww!
For all the on-set challenges, it’s clear these two have nothing but respect and affection for one another. We love to see that!
And between all the tears and confessions, one thing’s for sure: the SNL studio might be full of laughs, but it sounds like surviving it takes way more than just a good punchline.
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[Image via SNL/YouTube/YouTube]
