Bowen Yang has recalled the time a former Saturday Night Live host made “multiple cast members cry.”
During a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, Yang and his Las Culturistas podcast co-host Matt Rogers played a game of Truth or Kink, where they were given “saucy” questions to answer.
For his first question, Yang was asked to reveal the worst SNL host behavior he’d ever witnessed.
Without naming names, the 33-year-old Fire Island star remembered: “This man – this person, this host – made multiple cast members cry on Wednesday before the table read because he hated the ideas.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” host Cohen responded, with Rogers joking that the person in question “has new PR and everything.”
Elsewhere on the talk show, Yang was asked by a fan to identify what SNL skit was his “biggest bomb,” to which he answered: “Oh this is interesting. You know, when Ayo Edebiri hosted this past season, we wrote a live sketch where it took place in an elevator and she and I were telling everyone that we should all make out or something.
“For some reason, it got turned into a pre-tape under our noses and then we had to adapt to that,” he explained. “It just didn’t go as well as I had hoped and you just deal with it.”
Yang added: “Comedy’s subjective, you never know how it’s gonna play in front of a specific audience. So it’s fine, you let it roll off your back.”
The Awkwafina From Queens actor first joined SNL as a writer in 2018 before he was promoted to part of the on-air cast a year later.
Since joining as a full-time cast member, some of Yang’s most memorable skits have included him portraying a talking balloon in reference to the suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down by the US military in February 2023. In October 2022, he also memorably skewered Elon Musk, Kanye West, Joe Biden and Chris Pratt during the show’s cold open.
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In 2021, Yang made SNL history as the first Chinese American cast member to receive an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, which he earned after having only appeared on two seasons of the NBC comedy sketch show.
Though it has yet to be confirmed, Bowen is expected to return for SNL’s forthcoming season 50, which premieres on September 28.
The new season will welcome back Maya Rudolph who will reprise her popular impersonation of Vice President Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, it was recently announced that Steve Martin declined SNL creator Lorne Michael’s request that he play Minnesota Governor Tim Walz alongside Rudolph’s Harris.