Former Saturday Night Live players Ego Nwodim and Heidi Gardner got teary over their departure from the show after Season 51 began.
On the Tuesday (Oct. 28) episode of Nwodim's podcast Thanks Dad, the comedians reflected on their time on SNL after announcing that Season 50 would be their last.
Now that Nwodim has left, the sketch show currently does not star a Black woman. Gardner joined SNL one year before Nwodim, and the comedians shared a dressing room at the show's 30 Rock location.
"I’m 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," Gardner said around the hour mark of the video below. "I just mean we’re human, so we have egos, we want things for ourselves, we want to succeed. There weren’t a lot of times we were able to succeed the way we wanted at the exact same time."
Gardner also shared that a particular "beautiful" time she had watching Nwodim perform was during Jack Black Week.
"I got to go out there and watch it and to have you have it with my favorite person in the world, and you’re my favorite person in the world, it’s like, what is my life, this is so beautiful, and we wanted it," she recalled. "We knew how special that was, and I knew how important it was to you and the people who—everyone loves you."
Nwodim added that there were few occasions that she and Gardner were "winning together" and said that the show often was not "the easiest place to work." But to Nwodim, Gardner's presence was "such a light in what can be such a challenging place."
"The sketches, they come, they go, they’re really fun," Nwodim continued. "They can be hard, they can be things you’re not into, whatever. ... 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."
Ahead of SNL's Season 51 premiere on Oct. 4, five new members joined. Devon Walker, Emil Wakim, and Michael Longfellow left the show along with Nwodim and Gardner.