Saturday Night Live has been running for decades on NBC (and streaming with a Peacock subscription), and is showing no signs of slowing down. The beloved sketch comedy series is a dream job for many comedians, although SNL is a notoriously exhausting job. Andy Samberg recently got real about the toll SNL takes on cast members after years and years, being quoted saying “I just kinda fell apart.” Let’s break it all down.
Samberg joined SNL back in 2005, and was in the cast for seven seasons until his departure in 2012. He and the folks at The Lonely Island were responsible for some truly iconic digital shorts, including Justin Timberlake’s “Dick in a Box.” While appearing on Kevin Hart’s show Hart to Hart, the Brooklyn Nine-Nine star spoke about how digital shorts became a regular pat of the sketch show, offering:
And then they started asking us to do ours every week, whether we had an idea we liked or not, which were were grateful for most weeks. But then after five years of that, Kiv and Jorm both started being like– their contracts as writer were up, and they both sort of left but would come back to help me out.
While at first the Lonely Island boys’ digital shorts came organically, it was more difficult when tasked with creating one for every new episode of SNL. And the pressure started really mounting when Andy Samberg’s collaborators Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccon departed to work on other projects.
Later in that same interview, the Palm Springs star revealed how physically taxing the schedule for Saturday Night Live became for him, especially because he was working on digital shorts as well as the live segments. In Samberg’s words:
I was basically left in charge of making the short, which I never pretended I could do without them. […] Physically it was taking a heavy toll on me, and I got to place where I was like– I hadn’t slept in seven years basically. Because we were writing stuff for the live show Tuesday night all night, then table read Wednesday, then being told ‘Now come up with a digital short.’ So write all Thursday, all Thursday night, don’t sleep. Get up, shoot Friday. Edit all night Friday night and into Saturday. So it’s basically four days a week you’re not sleeping for seven years. So I just kind of fell apart physically.
Sounds pretty brutal, right? The schedule itself is dizzying, especially the lack of sleep on Samberg’s part. And that level of exhaustion doesn’t even take into account bad shows, or when Lorne Michaels cuts SNL sketches. So who can really blame the 45 year-old comedian/actor for eventually departing the iconic sketch show?
This look behind the curtain shows just how insanely hard the cast and crew of SNL works for the show every week. And while audiences are quick to criticize bad episodes, there’s a ton of effort (and a lack of sleep) going into each new installment.
Andy Samberg’s time on SNL can be streamed by watching Peacock. Check out the TV premiere list to plan your next binge watch.