Following their exits from Saturday Night Live ahead of last year’s milestone 50th season, Punkie Johnson and Chloe Troast recently opened up about life after the NBC sketch comedy show.
Although Troast admitted at a farewell party for the current outgoing cast members that her life is “fundamentally changed” after joining the show for Season 49, but has since found it “really hard” adjusting to life outside of Studio 8H.
“You don’t get a cushion when you fall,” she told People, noting that she was fortunate to be able to lean on family and close friends.
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“Even before the show, they were the ones that were a guiding light, and so then that’s what I looked to after,” added Troast. “And I feel like without that, I don’t know where I would be one year out, to be honest.”
Johnson, who spent four seasons on the show after joining in 2020, explained that the show is “a different monster, a different beast” that “mad put the pressure on you,” adding that “you can’t leave SNL and then go do the same things you was doing before.”
“It just put the pressure on you because everybody always like, ‘Yo, what’s next? What’s next?’ So you feel like you have to go do the next big thing,” added Johnson. “I had to figure out how to understand the difference between, all right, cool, you did something really great. And now it’s okay for you to just go through the motions and just no rush and figure out what’s next for you. It’s okay for you to figure that out.”
The Bottoms actress said, “It’s very hard to understand a place like that. They just throw you in the water — you better know how to swim. They don’t give you no life jacket.”
Still, Johnson notes that the experience of being on SNL “builds something inside of you that makes you so strong,” adding: “I feel like I could go out in Hollywood and handle anything because I handled every piece of adversity that went on in that building. I don’t think nothing could really break me no more because they honestly really built me up and made me strong mentally.”
The Season 50 finale special SNL50 aired in May with no cast goodbyes, but the show has since parted ways with Michael Longfellow, Heidi Gardner, Devon Walker, Emil Wakim, John Higgins and Ego Nwodim.