Andy Samberg was such an in-demand cast member on Saturday Night Live that he ultimately had to leave the show for his own sake.
The actor-comedian, 45, was a guest on Kevin Hart's Peacock talk show Hart to Heart, where he explained that despite becoming a household name through the show, he felt tremendous pressure.
"It was a big choice. For me, it was like, I can't actually endure it anymore. But I didn't want to leave," Samberg, who joined the show in 2005, said about his choice to exit SNL, per Entertainment Weekly. "Physically and emotionally, like I was falling apart in my life."
Samberg revealed to Hart that he dreamed of being on SNL since he was 8 years old, joining the cast along with his fellow Lonely Island members Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone in the same year. But when Schaffer and Taccone left the series after their five-year contract was up, and Samberg recalled being "basically left in charge of making the shorts."
"Which I never pretended like I could do without them," Samberg continued. "We made stuff I'm really proud of in those last two years, but there's something about the songs that I can only do with Akiva and Jorm. It's just how it is, we're just a band in that way."
Samberg acknowledged that he sought advice from SNL alum Amy Poehler, but that the show didn't want him to depart.
"They told me straight up, 'We prefer you would stay,' and I was like, 'Oh, that makes it harder," he said. "But I just was like, I think to get back to a feeling of, like, mental and physical health, I have to do it. So I did it and it was a very difficult choice."
Looking back on SNL as "if it doesn't go as well, I got to do the thing I wanted to do so everything past this point is icing," Samberg doesn't have any regrets about being on the show. "It sounds very corny and rehearsed, but I'm just always like I still can't believe I get to do comedy for a living," Samberg said. "It's all I wanted to do. I got to be on SNL. It went way better than I expected."
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