Chloe Fineman knew her Saturday Night Live niche

Fineman initially seemed like a straight-down-the-middle SNL leading lady. But at her frequent best, she was never a comforting throwback.

By Jesse Hassenger  |  July 17, 2026 | 3:00pm
Photo: Nora Rockwell/NBC
TV Features Saturday Night Live
Chloe Fineman knew her Saturday Night Live niche

Yesterday, the annual summer tradition of Saturday Night Live cast turnover kicked off with the announcement that Chloe Fineman is leaving the cast after seven seasons. Seven seasons (or the option for them, anyway) seems to be the typical contract length for an SNL hire, which means Fineman ends her time at the show doing something she otherwise tended to avoid: What was more or less expected of her. 

When Fineman joined the show at the beginning of Season 45 in 2019, she started alongside Bowen Yang and Shane Gillis, who took off in oppositionally unpredictable directions: Yang quickly became a favorite with left-field Weekend Update characters and a highly, delightfully specific gay and Asian cultural sensibility the show had never really accessed, while Gillis was preemptively fired before making it to air for racist remarks he’d made on a podcast. (Oh, excuse me, Shaneheads: incisive jokes about racism with the exact tone and wording of racism!).That should have left Fineman as the more traditional hire, and she certainly sent out those signals with her impressions of celebrities like Meryl Streep, Drew Barrymore, Britney Spears, and Nicole Kidman. All of those stars had been famous since the 1990s or earlier, which seemed to create expectations from some fans of the show that Fineman herself was something of a throwback to a beloved central female figure like Amy Poehler or Ana Gasteyer, with a dash of youthful, underappreciated Abby Elliott energy. 

Fineman quickly added more recently minted stars like Timothée Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney to her repertoire, as well as newly revitalized figures like Jennifer Coolidge and Jojo Siwa. But as she established these trademarks, it also seemed vaguely unlikely that she would assume a Poehler or Kristen Wiig-style role as the “main” female cast member. The pandemic convinced Aidy Bryant, Kate McKinnon, and Cecily Strong to stick around longer than they might’ve otherwise, and Fineman never landed on a particular breakout recurring character, in sketches or on Weekend Update. Less circumstantially, it would be fair to say that the impressions she became known for were a mixed bag. She captured the California cadence of Drew Barrymore and the prestige-wine-mom gestures of a later-career Streep, but her Britney was a little touch-and-go, and her Sydney Sweeney felt like it was based on a specific set of interviews that didn’t entirely translate. (She also had the unfortunate distinction of doing a very good Jennifer Coolidge impression alongside an even-better one from Ariana Grande, a near-flawless vocal mimic.) In the immeasurable but hard-to-ignore metric of SNL fan reactions online, she seemed to engender equal annoyance and affection, probably because a lot of passionate SNL viewers much prefer to slot new stars into easy comparisons with past players. They seem to find it comforting. 

At her frequent best, Fineman was not a comforting throwback. She could be genuinely pretty weird. She apparently auditioned with a sticker-covered, heavily accented character then called Queef, eventually and inevitably rechristened as Ooli, an Icelandic social media figure. As hinted above, Queef/Ooli would not prove to be Fineman’s equivalent of Gilly. In fact, she hasn’t appeared on SNL in years. But Ooli’s front-camera weirdness, particularly in her SNL At Home debut back in spring 2020, revealed one compatibility between Fineman and her fellow hire Yang: They seem to be the most online performers in the show’s history (at least so far). For Fineman, this translated into playing Braylor, the co-host of the Snackomiez podcast, capturing the rhythms of tweenage-boy banter with frightening accuracy; impersonating Alex Cooper, the real-life Call Her Daddy host with a particularly young-millennial affect; and imbuing her appearances on roll-call TikTok-scroll sketches with the sensibility of someone who really does spend a considerable amount of time scrolling TikTok. She also starred alongside her impression subject Sweeney in an instant classic about police interns—excuse me, “22-year-old girls in situationships”—cracking cold cases using social media. (The sketch may have aired a blessed single time, but a disaffected intonation of “found him” is still an SNL catchphrase to me.) 


 

Fineman’s real-life Instagram pushes closer to influencer territory than any other cast member’s, albeit with more self-deprecating humor than most similar figures would allow. In the context of her work on the show, it feels like close research, whether it actually is or not; part of Fineman’s SNL appeal is how close she was able to get to seeming like an actual screen-addled sociopath before stepping back with a wink. Her more occasional outright star turns tended to be meta affairs, like the pre-taped segment about her serving as the “understudy” for the entire SNL cast, involving doing sometimes-nonsensical impressions of her coworkers, or her similarly behind-the-scenes-set riff on Inventing Anna, where the mild challenge of imitating Julia Garner’s performance on that Netflix miniseries seemingly turns into a psychological compulsion. 

This is not particularly what anyone would have predicted from Fineman’s early seeming facility with impressions or her rom-com-heroine look. She seemed, back then, like a potential straight-down-the-middle SNL leading lady, which requires a bizarre cross between utility player and comic diva. She could fulfill both of those roles, sometimes simultaneously–she holds the center of the “Domingo” sketches with her blithe insistence that nothing is amiss in her song-narrated extramarital adventures–but more often seemed happier filling that weirder, sometimes borderline malevolent niche. Her extracurricular activities echoed that weirdness: She memorably, briefly appears in Megalopolis—a loopy collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola can’t be claimed by many (any?) other SNL alumni except those in the cast when Coppola guest-directed an episode of the show back in 1986.

Fineman’s sidelong approach seemed to work out fine anyway. By Season 51, her final year on the show, she was the longest-tenured woman in the ensemble anyway, and her exit shows a keen sense that it’s not always best to push toward a full decade, as so many cast members have in recent years. Despite that pragmatism, it’s difficult to picture what Fineman’s next niche will look like. That’s exactly why she’ll be missed from the show.

 
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