Pete Davidson has confirmed that he will be returning for Season 47: Pete Davidson on Modeling in the Moose Knuckles Campaign, Wearing a Dress at the Met Gala and Desire for His Own Line
Cast has been finalized Lauren Holt and Beck Bennett are leaving Everyone else is staying New additions- Aristotle Ahari, James Austin Johnson and Satah Sherman way too many cast members
Wow, that’s unfortunate, I was hoping they’d clean house this season. How many cast members is that now?
That's it? They go UP by a net of one? Poor Lauren Holt, she didn't get much of a chance. Beck has been there long enough, so time for him to move on. But it's time for a LOT of those staying to move on.
Way too many cast members. Feel bad for the featured players. A few 5+ season veterans should have got the boot (I volunteer Aidy and Pete).
Yeah, I like Kyle but he seems to have increasingly less to do on the show. The audience never really warmed up to his (and Becks) filmed pieces the way they loved The Lonely Island's digital shorts. His stuff is really too niche for SNL and really belongs on Adult Swim or something.
21: Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson, Colin Jost, Michael Che, Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner, Alex Moffat, Kyle Mooney, Ego Nwodim, Chris Redd, Melissa Villaseñor, Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang. Along with featured players Andrew Dismukes, Punkie Johnson, Aristotle Athari, James Austin Johnson and Sarah Sherman.
Kyle "cut for time" Mooney could go out with one final WU appearance as Bruce Chandling (a character I always like), but make it clearly about the audience not going for his stuff. Do it early in the season (like week 1) and bow out Kyle. Don't hang around all year.
‘SNL’: Beck Bennett & Lauren Holt Exiting, Rest Of Cast Returns As NBC Variety Series Adds Three Featured Players
New cast, L to R: Aristotle Athari, Sarah Sherman, James Austin Johnson The girl almost looks like a Melissa Villasenor character.
And 21 is the new record for largest cast ever, breaking last year's record of 20, which broke the previous season's record of 17. Lorne Michaels seems to have grown cautious in his old age. He seems afraid to shake things up and is sticking with proven quantities. Such a large cast is really unwieldy and will make it hard for anyone new to break out. I wonder what the deal is with Beck Bennett, also? If you're retaining a cast that large, what's even the point of singling out just one veteran cast member to dump? The difference between 21 and 22 cast members is negligible.
With such a large cast, maybe the plan is to have the extent of Kim Kardashian's hosting duty be a monologue and that's it. One can hope. Or maybe they could just photo her for the bumpers, and not even bother with her trying to give a speech.
Granted, I'm speculating. But it seems to me that if he was leaving of his own accord, he would have announced it himself rather than waiting for NBC to issue a press release listing the new cast with him not on it. And he probably would have announced it earlier than a mere five days before the season premiere. All this creates the impression that he's been waiting around to see if he was coming back or not (as noted upthread, Cecily Strong didn't even know whether she was going to be asked back a week ago). And his public statement today (“Love you, SNL. Gonna miss you so much. Thank you for 8 years of remarkable people and incredible experiences that completely changed my life. I had so much fun”) doesn't contain any of that "I felt it was time for a new challenge" stuff you would expect if he'd chosen to leave. Of course I could be wrong, but the circumstances make it seem more likely than not that he fired.
I've thought the same thing from day one from his first and subsequent non-funny performances. The grown man executive acting like an over stimulated baby was excruciating to watch. The funniest I've ever seen Bennett was in a GEICO insurance commercial as a straight man talking to children in a school room. He should've stuck with less is more approach at SNL.
