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Casual star Michaela Watkins is opening up about her short-lived tenure at Saturday Night Live. In a new interview on The Daily Beast’s The Last Laugh podcast, Watkins revealed that she was blindsided by her sudden firing in 2009, after just one season on the NBC comedy. “It does play out rather coolly, if I’m being honest,” the actress recalled. “Everybody was presented with contracts except for two people. It is a little rude.”
When Watkins was joined SNL in 2008, it was under historic circumstances: at 37 years old, she was the show’s oldest female cast member ever hired (Leslie Jones later broke this record when she was hired at 47 years old in 2014). “It was unheard of,” she told The Last Laugh host Matt Wilstein. “Women my age don’t get on SNL. I don’t think they knew how old I was and I probably shouldn’t have told them.”
However, the good vibes didn’t last long. Watkins was fired after just one season, and she recalls that the experience was fraught from the beginning. “I feel like it was a marathon, but the week I got there, they cut my Achilles,” she said. “They’re like, okay, start running. I don’t feel like I came in into a soft landing at all.”
Watkins thought that joining SNL would be “her big break” and felt “that it was going well,” but at the end of the season, the show declined to renew her contract. “Maybe I was delusional. I really wanted to go back. I would have been really happy if they’d had me for three seasons,” she told Wilstein. “I felt like that would have been a really nice time there, but they had me for one. And then they had me no more.”
More than 10 years later, Watkins has moved past her frustration and now embraces the experience. “It was a real humbling moment that I think personally was a huge growth for me,” said the actress. “It forced me to sit with a lot of uncomfortable feelings and sadness and rejection and think about how I wanted to shape my life going forward.”
Listen to Michaela Watkins’ entire interview on The Last Laugh podcast, and check her out in Search Party Season 3, out June 25 on HBO Max.
