To hear Devon Walker tell it, his recent exit from Saturday Night Live was, in celebrity parlance, a conscious uncoupling. Speaking out about his shock departure from the NBC sketch-comedy show, the comedian revealed it was a mutual decision.
“To be frank, I guess the best way I put it is like me and the show kind of looked at each other, and we decided together that it was time to go our separate ways,” Walker told Rolling Stone in an interview posted online yesterday. “I think I felt ready to leave the show, and I think the show felt ready to leave me.”
He went on: “I was just ready to do something else. We both felt like it was time. This was such a big time commitment, and life commitment. There’s been a lot of life stuff that I feel like I’ve had to miss out on. And I felt ready to do a different version of my life. I think that me and the show are both ready to turn the page.”
Walker announced his SNL exit in an August 25 Instagram post, writing, “Me and baby broke up,” as he shared a slideshow of snapshots from his time in Studio 8H.
And in a note shown in one of the slides — one coyly titled “Did he quit or did he get fired?” — he elaborated on the career move. “Me and the show did three years together, and sometimes it was really cool. Sometimes it was toxic as hell,” he wrote in part. “We made the most of what it was, even amidst all of the dysfunction. We made a f***ed up lil’ family.”
Two days later, Emil Wakim announced he, too, was leaving Saturday Night Live after one season as a featured player, saying on Instagram it “was a gut punch of a call to get.” And a day after that came the news that Michael Longfellow would be departing SNL after two years as a featured player and one year in the repertory — “Wish I was [returning], but so it goes,” he said in his Instagram post — and that Heidi Gardner, whose eight-season run made her SNL’s longest-serving female Season 50 cast member, was also out.
The sweeping SNL cast shakeup stunned fans, but Walker downplayed the drama in an X post on Thursday. “Y’all acting like we died, lol,” he wrote. “We just getting different jobs.”