So far, the buzzsaw cutting its annual swath through the cast of Saturday Night Live has stuck to newer faces, with Lorne Michaels bidding what we have to assume were extremely muted farewells to three-season alums Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker, and first-year cast member Emil Wakim. Now, though, Variety reports that Heidi Gardner, one of the longest-serving members of the current cast, will not be back for the show’s 51st season.
Gardner originally joined the show’s roster back in 2017, and has risen to be the longest-serving female cast member on the series, a reliable wellspring of oddball characters and comic energy. (She has also, in that time, managed the sometimes-tricky transition into other projects once her late-night sketch comedy bona fides had been proven on a national level, notably with a recurring role on Apple TV+ comedy Shrinking.) Memorable characters included her recurring Weekend Update bit Angel (“Every boxer’s girlfriend in a boxing movie”), teenage film critic Baily Gisbert, as well as a whole host of celebrity impressions. (To say nothing of one of the most transcendently joyful moments the show has produced in the last few years, when Gardner utterly broke at the sight of co-star Mikey Day and guest host Ryan Gosling decked out like Beavis and Butt-Head.)
Deadline notes that Gardner had dropped a few mild signals that her run on the series might be coming to an end soon; in a podcast conversation with Craig Ferguson on his podcast Joy back in February, she noted that life on the show had gotten a “little tough,” and that a solid decade of writing and performing comedy sketches—Gardner came up in the Groundlings before making the move to SNL—had given her a certain degree of “sketch fatigue.”
