Former Saturday Night Live cast members Ego Nwodim and Heidi Gardner got emotional reflecting on their exit from the show following the start of Season 51.
During the Tuesday (Oct. 28) episode of Nwodim’s podcast Thanks Dad, the two comedians looked back on their time on SNL after revealing that Season 50 would be their final one.
With Nwodim’s departure, the show no longer features a Black woman in the cast. Gardner, who joined the series a year before Nwodim, shared a dressing room with her at 30 Rock, where they formed a close bond.
“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 one-hour mark of the episode. “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 went on to recall one especially “beautiful” moment she experienced watching Nwodim perform 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 said. “We knew how special that was, and I knew how important it was to you and the people who—everyone loves you.”
Nwodim reflected on how rare it was for them to be “winning together,” admitting that SNL wasn’t always “the easiest place to work.” Still, she said 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 added. “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.”
Before the Season 51 premiere of SNL on Oct. 4, five new cast members joined the show. Devon Walker, Emil Wakim, and Michael Longfellow also departed alongside Nwodim and Gardner.
