Saturday Night Live alums Punkie Johnson and Chloe Troast are opening up about being fired from the long-running sketch comedy program as it undergoes a massive cast transformation.
“It’s very hard to understand a place like that. They just throw you in the water — you better know how to swim. They don’t give you no life jacket,” Johnson told PEOPLE at an official farewell party for the various cast members leaving the show held at New York City’s Riff Raff Club on Friday. The stand-up comedian, who left SNL after four seasons in 2024, described it as “a different monster, a different beast,” but maintained that it “builds something inside of you that makes you so strong.”
Troast, who, like Johnson, left SNL following season 49, but having starred on only a single season, shared that the experience “fundamentally changed” her life, but has been finding it “really hard” to adjust back to regular civilian life.
“You don’t get a cushion when you fall,” Troast said.
The 28-year-old joked at the time that it was “very Gen Z of me to get fired,” but found solace in the fact that stars like Adam Sandler, Jenny Slate, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus were once in her same position. She told PEOPLE that family and friends have been acting as a “guiding light” since her firing, “so then that’s what I looked to after. And I feel like without that, I don’t know where I would be one year out, to be honest.”
Johnson, who shared an image from the Oct. 3 party with departing players Emil Wakim and Devon Walker on Instagram, reflected on the “mad put the pressure on you” by the demands of the live, weekly sketch comedy program.
“I feel like I could go out in Hollywood and handle anything, because I handled every piece of adversity that went on in that building,” she said. “I don’t think nothing could really break me no more, because they honestly really built me up and made me strong mentally.”
The comedian previously described the SNL split as “a neutral thing. By February of last season, I was like, ‘Nope, I’m done,'” she noted in August 2024, four months after her firing was announced. Now she feels the added pressure of the SNL pedigree on her resume, saying, “You can’t leave SNL and then go do the same things you was doing before.”
“It just put the pressure on you because everybody always like, ‘Yo, what’s next? What’s next?’ So you feel like you have to go do the next big thing,” Johnson shared, but said that she’s been able to assure herself that “It’s okay for you to just go through the motions and just no rush and figure out what’s next for you. It’s okay for you to figure that out.”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Johnson and Troast both departed in advance of SNL‘s historic 50th season, which aired from September 2024 to May 2025, and included several celebratory and retrospective specials that featured the returns of iconic alums like Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Molly Shannon, and Martin Short.
EW reached out to representatives for Johnson and Troast.
The transition from season 49 to season 50 was rocky enough, with the departures of Johnson and Troast, as well as Molly Kearney, the series’ first openly nonbinary cast member. But the recent shift from season 50 to season 51, which premiered on Saturday, was even more turbulent.
Five new cast members were announced in September: Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Kam Patterson, Veronika Slowikowska, and Ben Marshall, whose comedy group Please Don’t Destroy, has been creating digital shorts for the series since 2021.
Five arrivals are a lot for one season, but they’re offset by five departures, several of them major. The most shocking exits announced ahead of the season 51 premiere came from seven-season alum Ego Nwodim and eight-season alum Heidi Gardner. Season 51 also arrives without Devon Walker and Michael Longfellow, both of whom joined the show in 2022, and Emil Wakim, who, like Troast, had only appeared on a single season of the show before announcing his exit.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly