Just one week after Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels revealed a shake-up for the NBC late-night comedy sketch series, two cast members and two writers are not returning.
On August 27, cast member Emil Wakim announced he wouldn’t be returning to the show, following previous departures announced by cast member Devon Walker and writers Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker on August 25.
Wakim shared the news via Instagram. He wrote, “I won’t be returning to SNL next year. It was a gut-punch of a call to get, but I’m so grateful for my time there. I was at Six Flags celebrating my friend's 36th birthday and went on a really emotional walk through Bugs Bunny Park and stared out across Daffy Duck Lake thinking about life.”
He continued, “Every time I scanned into the building, I would think how insane it is to get to work there. It was the most terrifying, thrilling, and rewarding experience of my life, and I will miss it dearly and all the brilliant people who work there who made it feel like a home. Thank u to Lorne for taking a chance on me and changing my life.”
On Instagram, Walker joked, “Me and baby broke up.” At the top of the note on the third slide of his post, he added, “To me, jobs in this industry feel like a bunch of little marriages,” he begins. “Some of them last for a long time if we’re lucky, but most of them are fleeting. Permanent until they’re not. That’s the deal. You know what it is when you sign up.”
Writers Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker also shared the news that they would not be returning for the new season. This news came on the heels of a report by Puck on August 22, when Michaels revealed there would be a cast shakeup for Season 51. "Yeah, for sure. It’ll be announced in a week or so,” the producer revealed.
Additionally, Michaels shared that it was important to him to hold his core cast together through the show’s 50th anniversary. He revealed, “Last season, when we were at the party of the first show, quarter of four in the morning, Dana [Carvey, who played Joe Biden] comes over to me and says, 'I don’t think anyone knows you called me June 4th [to play Biden].’”
He added, “I wanted people coming back and being part of [the 50th season]. So when Kate [McKinnon] hosted, Kristen [Wiig] and Maya [Rudolph] came back for it. And that meant there couldn’t be those kinds of disruptions [to the cast], or anything that was going to take the focus off [the 50th season]. And we had an election.”