Kenan Thompson addresses Morgan Wallen’s “abrupt” ‘Saturday Night Live’ exit
Saturday Night Live is certainly no stranger to controversial music moments. On March 30th, country star Morgan Wallen went viral when he appeared to storm off the set during the ‘goodnights’ segment. In a new interview, long-serving cast member Kenan Thompson commented on the moment.
Thompson has been an integral part of SNL for over 20 years, having first joined the show in 2003. In that time, he has seen his fair share of viral, controversial, or otherwise noteworthy moments. However, even he seemed to be fairly baffled by Wallen’s behaviour on the show.
After performing the songs ‘I’m The Problem’ and ‘Just In Case’, the singer left the stage seemingly in anger at the end of the show after saying goodbye to Mikey Madison but ignoring the rest of the cast before departing. Following the incident, he posted a photo of a private jet to his Instagram, accompanied by the caption, “Get me to God’s country.”
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Thompson shared, “I don’t know what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that. I don’t know if he understood the assignment or not, or if he was really feeling a certain kind of way.”
“I thought maybe he had to go to the potty or something,” the cast member joked. “It’s definitely a spike in the norm. We’re so used to everybody just turning around and high-fiving us, everybody’s saying, ‘Good job, good job, good job.’ So when there’s a departure from that, it’s like, ‘Hmm, I wonder what that’s about?’”
The comedian added that Wallen “seems like a complicated individual, I guess.” He also added that Prince did a very similar walk-out on SNL, before clarifying, “I’m not saying Morgan Wallen is Prince, but we weren’t surprised because Prince was notoriously kind of standoffish.”
“But Saturday, I guess it was just different because it just felt so abrupt,” he continued. “And it was already such a small grouping on the stage anyway. So it was just like, oh wow, that was pretty visible. You know what I’m saying? It was a pretty visible thing.”
Looking ahead to this weekend’s episode, he concluded, “But whatever. Moving on, we got a new show. We got Jack Black this week.”
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