{"id":105494,"date":"2025-08-29T13:49:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T13:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/105494\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T13:49:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T13:49:07","slug":"heidi-gardner-leaves-snl-after-8-seasons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/105494\/","title":{"rendered":"Heidi Gardner leaves ‘SNL’ after 8 seasons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heidi Gardner<\/a> is saying goodbye to Saturday Night Live<\/a> after eight seasons on the cast.\n<\/p>\n

Entertainment Weekly has learned Gardner will not be part of the show’s 51st season when it premiere in October. Vulture was first<\/a> to report the news.\n<\/p>\n

News of her departure comes amid a big cast shakeup at SNL. Castmates\u00a0Devon Walker<\/a>, Michael Longfellow<\/a>, and featured player Emil Wakim<\/a> all announced this week that they would also not be part of the upcoming season. Writers Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker have also exited the show.\n<\/p>\n

Michael Che and Heidi Gardner on ‘Saturday Night Live’.<\/p>\n

Will Heath\/NBCU Photo Bank\/NBCUniversal via Getty\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gardner joined the SNL cast for season 43 in 2017. Although during her first several seasons she had to jockey for screen time alongside fan-favorite show staples like Kate McKinnon<\/a>, Aidy Bryant<\/a>, and Cecily Strong,<\/a> she steadily made a name for herself and rose to the occasion when the time came to fill her famous costars’ shoes when they stepped away.\n<\/p>\n

A standout in sketches as both a solid utility player and a wacky lead character, Gardner delivered equally memorable “Weekend Update” caricatures, including Angel, a.k.a. Every Boxer’s Girlfriend From Every Movie About Boxing Ever; teen film critic Bailey Gismert; Goop employee Baskin Johns; and a character known as Your Co-worker Who Is Extremely Busy Doing Seemingly Nothing.\n<\/p>\n

Gardner made headlines in April 2024 when the generally unflappable actress hilariously broke character repeatedly in a sketch with pal Mikey Day and host Ryan Gosling both wearing full prosthetics to play live-action versions of Beavis and Butt-Head.\n<\/p>\n

Heidi Gardner on breaking during Beavis and Butt-Head sketch on ‘SNL’.<\/p>\n

NBC<\/p>\n

“I was trying to imagine seeing [Day] in my head so I was prepared for it, but I just couldn’t prepare for what I saw. I really tried,” Gardner said of losing it on camera<\/a>. “I even saw Mikey out of the corner of my eye seconds before I went live. I saw the red shorts. I knew I couldn’t look over there again. Mikey even told me later that he was bending down and hiding himself so I wouldn’t see him.”<\/p>\n

One of her personal achievements came when the Kansas City Chiefs superfan convinced show boss Lorne Michaels to get NFL star Travis Kelce to host a 2023 episode<\/a>. “Lorne was like, ‘Well, he has to win the Super Bowl.’ I was like, ‘That is so much pressure to ask. And then he won the Super Bowl,” Gardner recalled.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In addition to her work on SNL, Gardner had a standout role on Apple TV+’s Shrinking and has appeared on episodes of You, Superstore, Veep, The Other Two, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, as well as in Adam Sandler’s Hustle.\n<\/p>\n

Saturday Night Live season 51 premieres Oct. 4 at 11:30 p.m. ET\/8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and Peacock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heidi Gardner is saying goodbye to Saturday Night Live after eight seasons on the cast. Entertainment Weekly has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-105494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}