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Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang has shared more details about the unnamed host who he said made cast members cry.
During an appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen last month, Yang was asked to reveal the worst SNL host behavior he’d ever witnessed. “This man – this person, this host – made multiple cast members cry on Wednesday before the table read because he hated the ideas,” he responded.
Yang was asked to elaborate on the incident during Wednesday’s episode of David Spade and Dana Carvey’s Fly on the Wall podcast.
Yang said it was “more about the environment of the place” than the celebrity host’s behavior alone.
“Imagine you stay up until 4am writing a sketch, and then the host is like: ‘I f***ing hate this,’ you’re gonna have some [reaction],” he explained. “Your nerves are frayed.
“You’re gonna have some weird, bizarre, emotional response,” Yang continued, adding that he wasn’t “the one who cried.”
Carvey and Spade, who both starred in the long-running NBC sketch series in the Nineties, sympathized with their fellow comedian.
Spade recalled getting in trouble for saying that Steven Seagal had been the worst host to work with on SNL during a 2015 interview on Watch What Happens Live.
“Everyone gets in trouble for saying something, but that’s what everyone asks, and you can only dodge it for so long,” Spade said. “You just try to explain why they weren’t great.”
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Spade said of Seagal at the time: “He was a little tough. I mean, he was actually tough, and he was tough to work with. It was hard. He did not want to play along.”
SNL returns on 28 September with a re-assembled lineup of familiar faces, plus three new cast members.
The new series will see Maya Rudolph reprise her Emmy-winning take on Vice President Kamala Harris amid her bid for the presidency.
Yang first joined SNL as a writer in 2018 before he was promoted to part of the on-air cast a year later.
Since joining as a full-time cast member, some of Yang’s most memorable skits have included him portraying a talking balloon in reference to the suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down by the US military in February 2023. In October 2022, he also memorably skewered Elon Musk, Kanye West, Joe Biden and Chris Pratt during the show’s cold open.
In 2021, Yang made SNL history as the first Chinese American cast member to receive an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, which he earned after having only appeared on two seasons of the NBC comedy sketch show.
Elsewhere on the Fly on the Wall podcast, Yang said season 49 host Sydney Sweeney “practically begged” the SNL cast to “make jokes about my boobs.”
