The actor and comedian Bowen Yang will leave “Saturday Night Live” after this weekend’s episode, he announced in a post on Instagram on Saturday, an unexpected midseason departure for the five-time Emmy nominee.
“I loved working at S.N.L., and most of all I loved the people,” Yang wrote in his post, adding, “I’m grateful for every minute of my time there.”
He went on to thank Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, for giving him a job, for setting the “standard” and for “bringing everyone at work together.”
Representatives for Yang did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Yang, 35, is among the most celebrated cast members on the NBC sketch-comedy juggernaut. He joined “S.N.L.” in 2018 as a writer and started to appear in sketches the next season before eventually being promoted to the main cast. Yang was the show’s first Chinese American cast member and one of only a handful of L.G.B.T.Q. cast members in its history.
Some of his most memorable “S.N.L.” characters include the iceberg that sank the Titanic and a proud, gay Oompa-Loompa. He was also in the ad parody “Straight Male Friend” with the football star Travis Kelce and the digital short “Big Dumb Line.”
In April, Yang told Vanity Fair that he had thought about the end of his run. “It’s this growing, living thing where new people come in and you do have to sort of make way for them and to grow and to keep elevating themselves,” he said. “And that inevitably requires me to sort of hang it up at some point.”
Yang’s final “S.N.L.” episode will be hosted by Ariana Grande, one of the stars of “Wicked: For Good,” in which Yang also appears. Cher will be the musical guest.
In recent years, Yang has been increasingly busy. He hosts the popular “Las Culturistas” podcast with the actor and comedian Matt Rogers, on which they interview stars from across the pop culture world. This year, their sendup of awards shows, the Las Culturistas Culture Awards, aired on Bravo before being streamable on Peacock.
Yang has appeared in several television shows, including the Prime Video comedy “Overcompensating” and the HBO comedy-fantasy “Fantasmas.” In addition to “Wicked: For Good,” his film credits include last year’s “Wicked” and the 2022 romantic comedies “Fire Island” and “Bros.” He has also starred in both seasons of “Hot White Heist,” a scripted audio action-comedy series on Audible.
He will lend his voice to the “Cat in the Hat” animated movie that is expected next year. And he is listed as a cast member in an animated film still in development that is based on the graphic novel “Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting.
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
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