For all of its nearly 50-year history, Saturday Night Live has been a deeply impractical show. Every week, a 90-minute episode is written and produced in a matter of days by a bunch of sleep-deprived comedians (some of whom, at certain points in the show’s history, were on hard drugs). If the show was launched today, we might call it a toxic work environment, but that’s just how SNL has always functioned—as a kind of comedy torment nexus. Typically, the cast is made up of comics young and hardy enough to withstand these conditions. But at some point, we imagine, the body can no longer handle that particular cocktail of lack of sleep and intense, live-show adrenaline spikes. Such is the case for Andy Samberg.
Samberg was an extremely popular cast member in his day, and when he was considering his departure in 2012 the show (presumably boss Lorne Michaels) asked him to stay. Samberg didn’t want to leave, but he couldn’t “endure it anymore,” he explained in a new episode of Peacock’s Hart To Heart (via Entertainment Weekly). “Physically and emotionally, like I was falling apart in my life.”
One of the issues is that his fellow Lonely Island members, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, had left the show to work on their own projects. While Samberg and other collaborators “made stuff I’m really proud of in those last two years,” he didn’t love making digital shorts without his longtime partners. Even worse, “Physically, it was taking a heavy toll on me and I got to a place where I was like I hadn’t slept in seven years basically,” he said. “We were writing stuff for the live show Tuesday night all night, the table read Wednesday, then being told now come up with a digital short so write all Thursday [and] Thursday night, don’t sleep, get up, shoot Friday, edit all night Friday night and into Saturday, so it’s basically like four days a week you’re not sleeping, for seven years. So I just kinda fell apart physically.”
It was “a very difficult choice” to leave the show that had been his dream job his entire life, “But I just was like, I think to get back to a feeling of like mental and physical health, I have to do it,” Samberg said. He told himself that everything that came after SNL would be “icing”—and he continued to be successful, with a starring role on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and various Lonely Island projects, among other things. “It sounds very corny and rehearsed, but I’m just always like I still can’t believe I get to do comedy for a living,” Samberg reflected. “It’s all I wanted to do. I got to be on SNL. It went way better than I expected.”