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Andy Samberg Reflects on Walking Away From ‘SNL’: “It Was Taking a Heavy Toll on Me”
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Meanwhile Kenan will never leave.
He’s been there for 21 years, the show turns 50 next season. It’s nuts.
I really think it's just because Kenan has been doing it all of his life, and Samberg really started up after college. Not to say that there is anything wrong with that, I love Samberg, but I think it's just the Kenan feels more comfortable with it, and is more used to that particular grind.
I mean the guy can get laughs by giving a look at the right time, he's getting paid to just act how I'm imagining he acts normally and occasionally play the role of the one guy who knows way more about what's going on than the other characters.
I've heard him interviewed, and I'm pretty sure his on screen vibe is more performative that you'd think.
He's a comedian and he's good at his job. It's absolutely a role.
Also, Kenan isn't a writer on SNL AFAICT.
I think Andy Samberg/the Lonely Island crew was writing for both SNL proper as well producing the Digital Shorts that were nightmare production hours due to all the talent overlapping with the main SNL show. Anyone would be burnt out from that. I recall someone (I think it was Jorma Taccone maybe) mentioning like 18h production days for some of those a long time ago.
Not to discredit Kenan Thompson at all but I don't think he writes for SNL, or if he did it's very much in the distant past. His role would be a bit different from the likes of Andy, Tina, Seth etc.
I work in production in NYC. 18hr days aren’t unheard of, unfortunately. When it’s coupled with the rest of the grueling schedule, it can literally kill you. The unions have been trying to get our schedules made more logical for a long time. But the entire industry is built around this type of schedule. Gear gets rented by the day, so that entire business is modeled around that insane schedule, the spaces they rent to shoot are done by the day so getting a job done in one day is how that entire business is modeled…and we are contracted for the day and can only accept the one job/day, so our entire careers are built around this structure.
SNL, however, is a notoriously terrible job to work on. It’s known for being a massive headache, where you will work extra long hours deep into the night because they don’t start until too late in the day and because shit is getting planned and added on the fly. And they have a grueling level of quality, where you’re expected to get done in one day what would normally take days. And then you all gotta stay around to break it all right back down and get all that stuff returned to wherever they rented it from.
We can handle long days when we start early, that’s normal for us. But when they start pushing us back it really gets to be difficult. Because a lot of us get booked on a different job the next day, so you’re just losing your turnaround time for the following job. This life definitely isn’t for everyone.
I think he's got some dirt on Lorne Michaels and is just using it to maintain a steady paycheck. More power to him if so.