Bowen Yang is giving a little more insight into the Saturday Night Live host who he said made cast members cry.
Yang, 33, shared on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s “Fly on the Wall” podcast on Wednesday, September 25, that the “stressful environment” of SNL probably contributed to why the cast members were more likely to cry from the mystery host being mean towards them.
“Imagine you stay up until 4 a.m. writing a sketch and then the host is like, ‘I f—ing hate this,’” Yang, who has been on SNL since 2018, explained. “Your nerves are frayed, you’re going to have some weird, bizarre emotional response.”
Yang noted that he’s “not saying [he] was the one who cried.”
While he declined to directly reveal who the SNL host was, he did tell Carvey, 69, and Spade, 60, that he would tell them who it was “off-mic.”
Last month on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, Yang was asked to reveal the “worst behavior” that he’s seen from an SNL host — without naming names.
“This man who … this person, this host made multiple cast members cry on Wednesday before the table read because he hated the ideas,” Yang claimed.
Yang recently also addressed another awkward moment on SNL when fans speculated in January that he stood far away from Dave Chappelle with his arms crossed. (Chappelle, 51, did not have a role in the episode but appeared on stage while host Dakota Johnson was saying her final goodbyes for the evening alongside the fellow cast members.)
Chapelle has been criticized for anti-LGBTQIA+ jokes throughout the years. During his 2021 Netflix special, The Closer, Chapelle made headlines for his transphobic remarks — leading some Netflix employees to stage a walkout.
“I stand where I always stand on [goodnights],” Yang, who’s gay, told Variety in an interview in June. “It was not a physical distance that anyone was creating. It had to do with so many things that were completely internal.”
When asked whether he was happy with Chappelle’s random appearance, Yang replied, “It was about other people’s response in the show. I was just confused, that was it.”
Yang joined the show as a writer in 2018 and became a full-time cast member the following year. He became the first Chinese American SNL star.
Yang previously shared that he has developed a thicker skin since working on SNL and learned to not take things personally.
“At this point, I’m fully calloused all around my body and I don’t feel anything, so it’s fine, [creator Lorne Michaels] can do whatever he wants,” Yang shared in a Today interview in March.
