“Maybe I was delusional”: the ‘Saturday Night Live’ star who called their firing “a little rude”
We may only have had just a small taste of what Saturday Night Live is like to have on our screens on a weekly basis, thanks to the admittedly very good UK version launching this year, but over the pond, it is a six-decade institution that has launched some truly stellar careers.
It is also a pretty cutthroat place to try to make your way as a young up-and-coming comedian, as many have discovered since the programme began back in 1975 with a cast that included Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Since then, more than 1,000 episodes of SNL have been aired, over 51 seasons, and with an ever-changing cast of faces, each of whom is vying to become a ‘not ready for primetime player’.
And those 172 different cast members have all been watched over by the legendary creator of SNL, Lorne Michaels, a famously no-nonsense perfectionist with a brutal management style that can either make or break comedy hopefuls. One of those was Michaela Watkins, who joined the show back in 2008, at that point the oldest cast member to be brought in by Michaels at the age of 37.
Watkins had spent well over a decade working in theatre in New York City, hoping for a breakthrough, and so was naturally excited to join one of the world’s most famous TV shows. She made her first appearance in September of that year, playing Ariana Huffington in a sketch, and saw out the rest of the season taking on various recurring characters.
But when the show took a break between series, she was unceremoniously let go, along with another female actor, Casey Wilson. Watkins told The Daily Beast: “I thought that this was my big break. I thought that it was going well. I thought we were all having a good time, but then they didn’t renew my contract the next year. Maybe I was delusional. I really wanted to go back.”
She was left unhappy at the way her exit was handled by the show’s producers, adding, “It does play out rather coolly, if I’m being honest. Everybody was presented with contracts except for two people. It is a little rude. It’s like, ‘I just want to say, I love everybody but two of you.’ It was a real humbling moment that I think personally was a huge growth for me.
“It forced me to sit with a lot of uncomfortable feelings and sadness and rejection and think about how I wanted to shape my life going forward.”
That kind of treatment has been spoken about in the past in terms of SNL; another cast member called Michael Longfellow who was on the show in 2022 for instance revealed how he only found out his contract wasn’t going to be renewed after three seasons when, rather than getting a call from Michaels, his agent phoned him as he sat at an airport in Utah waiting to board a plane back to New York.
Watkins, meanwhile, wasn’t one to let her firing mean the end of her career. Since she was let go from 30 Rockefeller Place, she has produced, written and starred in a number of TV series and movies, including Hacks, Law and Order and the animated hit Archer. This year she’s appeared in Netflix’s action thriller The Night Agent, which has been renewed for a fourth and final season.
