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SNL Cast Exits Portend Big Changes for Historic Season 50

Molly Kearney took to Instagram on Friday to announce that they won’t be returning, just a day after fellow castmate Punkie Johnson also announced her exit.

Cast members are typically signed to seven-year contracts that can be broken by SNL, but not the performer, meaning that Kearney and Johnson were almost certainly let go by executive producer Lorne Michaels ahead of what is expected to be a super-sized 50th season. Johnson’s announcement also comes conspicuously close to the news that former cast member Maya Rudolph is apparently putting her Apple TV+ series Loot on hold to return to SNL as presidential candidate Kamala Harris. In a State of the Union cold open earlier this year, Johnson portrayed Vice President Harris, but her character didn’t even have any lines in a sketch that mostly belonged to Scarlett Johansson ’s Republican Senator Katie Britt.

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