He left early.
Photo: Will Heath/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Seeing that Bowen Yang was going to be part of Variety’s Actors on Actors panel this year was a shock: What was he promoting, exactly? But cast your mind back to 2025, and you’ll remember that he was a cast member for the first half of Saturday Night Live season 51. He used his interview with I Love LA star Rachel Sennott to explain his absence in the second half. “I was kind of resolute, the season before, about leaving,” he told her. “There was a lot of uncertainty about what the show would look like after season 50. I was like, ‘I think the show is in a great place without me.’ I never felt like I was that central to it, to be honest.”
Sennott, of course, disagreed with Yang — and seemingly so did the Emmys as Yang has been nominated four times for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. But he explained himself. “I never played the dad or the straight-man teacher,” Yang said. “I was always there as the seasoning, and I’m like, ‘That’s great. I’m so lucky. I can’t believe I have a steady job in comedy. I will cherish it for the rest of my life.’ And I just felt like it was the right time.”
Well, why didn’t he leave sooner? Because someone important told him that he was, in fact, central. “Lorne called me while I was at the U.S. Open eating Coqodaq chicken, and he was like, ‘Listen, you should come back. These are the people I’ve hired. It’s a lot of new kids, and a lot of people left. You should be there to set an example for them, at least in the first half of the season. I’m telling you, it would be very important.’” So Yang returned to see the show through half a season’s worth of character work and to shepherd the next generation of cast members into their glory. It’s Jeremy Culhane’s 30 Rock, now.
