{"id":217687,"date":"2025-09-11T08:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T08:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/217687\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T08:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T08:13:10","slug":"bowen-yang-praises-heidi-gardner-after-snl-exit-as-one-of-the-greats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/217687\/","title":{"rendered":"Bowen Yang Praises Heidi Gardner After SNL Exit as ‘One of the Greats’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBowen Yang<\/a> is praising his \u201cSaturday Night Live<\/a>\u201d co-star Heidi Gardner<\/a> after her exit from the series<\/a> after eight seasons.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou are one of the greats. You will go down in history,\u201d Yang said of Gardner on \u201cLas Culturistas,\u201d his podcast with Matt Rogers, who also offered effusive praise for the comedic actor.<\/p>\n

\n\tYang\u2019s return for his seventh season on \u201cSNL\u201d was announced earlier this week. The NBC sketch comedy series shed a handful of players \u2014 including Devon Walker, Michael Longfellow, Emil Wakim and John Higgins \u2014 while welcoming five new cast members. \u201cI will miss the people who are not coming back very, very much,\u201d Yang said.<\/p>\n

\n\tYang singled out Gardner as one of the only cast members on \u201cSNL\u201d who could be trusted to pen sketches alone, without a co-writer. \u201cIt\u2019s always a very, very vulnerable thing as a cast member to put only your name on it,\u201d Yang said. \u201cBut anytime you saw just \u2018Gardner,\u2019 you knew you were in good hands. She would take it upon herself to write pieces for other cast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRecalling his favorite pieces by Gardner, Yang said she once wrote a \u201cWeekend Update\u201d segment for Punkie Johnson, who left \u201cSNL\u201d in 2024. \u201cIt was one of the most beautiful, kindest gestures I\u2019ve ever seen at that show, and her heart was so big, and clearly so fucking funny,\u201d Yang said. \u201cA true anchor on that show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also talked about Gardner\u2019s presence off-screen at Studio 8H, saying she helped lift the cast and crew\u2019s spirits during the lockdown days of the pandemic. Gardner encouraged her castmates to send each other daily texts about things that made them smile, providing an emotional \u201cfoothold\u201d for Yang. \u201cJust a truly beautiful person,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\n\tYang and Gardner appeared in countless sketches together over the years, including \u201cSecretary\u201d with Pete Davidson and the food-centric Gardner showcase \u201cMile-High Burger Challenge.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d returns on NBC on Oct. 4. Read all about who joined, left and stayed on the program in Variety\u2018s Season 51 cast guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bowen Yang is praising his \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d co-star Heidi Gardner after her exit from the series after…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":217688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[69818,185,171,103064,1747,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-217687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-bowen-yang","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-heidi-gardner","12":"tag-saturday-night-live","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115184664870331812","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}