Alex Moffat, Melissa Villaseñor, Aristotle Athari to leave ‘SNL’
Three more comedians are departing “Saturday Night Live” as the sketch comedy show’s mass exodus continues ahead of its 48th season.
Alex Moffat, Melissa Villaseñor and Aristotle Athari were not expected to return to the show, Variety reported Thursday.
The exits were announced after long-tenured stars Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson, Kate McKinnon and Kyle Mooney announced their plans to leave the NBC institution in May.
The depleted remaining cast will also be without senior producer Lindsay Shookus, who declined to take a new role on the show last month.
“They’re shaking things up,” a source told Page Six at the time.
Moffat and Villaseñor had both been with the show since 2016 and were known for their impressions of Eric Trump and Joe Biden, and Björk and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez respectively.
Athari joined the show just last year as a featured player and was notable as the show’s first male performer of Middle Eastern descent.
Executive producer Lorne Michaels reportedly made the changes as he auditions new cast members ahead of the season’s October premier.
The statuses of longtime cast members Kenan Thompson and Cecily Strong had yet to be revealed amid rumors they could also not be long for Rockefeller Plaza’s Studio 8H.
“SNL” was the top rated entertainment show on television among the coveted 18- to 49-year-old demographic last year, Variety said. Online viewers watched more than five billion hours worth of clips from the show during the course of the season, according to Next TV.
The show has a history of mass exoduses.
In 1980, a slew of prominent cast members like Jane Curtin, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner fled the program a year after much of the original cast left. Another golden era ended in 1995 with the departures of Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler and others. Between 2012 and 2013, Andy Samberg, Kristin Wiig, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader left the show.
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