Bowen Yang leaving Saturday Night Live after Dec 27 episode

NEW YORK – Actor-comedian Bowen Yang will leave Saturday Night Live (SNL) after the Dec 27 episode, he announced in a post on Instagram on Dec 20, an unexpected mid-season departure for the five-time Emmy nominee.

“I loved working at SNL and most of all, I loved the people,” he wrote in his post, adding: “I’m grateful for every minute of my time there.”

He went on to thank Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, for giving him a job, for setting the standard and for bringing everyone at work together.

Representatives for Yang did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Dec 20.

The 35-year-old is among the most celebrated cast members on the NBC sketch-comedy juggernaut.

He joined SNL in 2018 as a writer and started to appear in sketches the next season before eventually being promoted to the main cast.

Yang was the show’s first Chinese-American cast member and one of only a handful of LGBTQ+ cast members in its history.

Some of his most memorable SNL characters include the iceberg that sank the Titanic and a proud, gay Oompa-Loompa. He was also in the ad parody Straight Male Friend with football star Travis Kelce and the digital short Big Dumb Line.

In April, Yang told Vanity Fair that he had thought about the end of his run.

“It’s this growing, living thing where new people come in and you do have to sort of make way for them and to grow and to keep elevating themselves,” he said. “And that inevitably requires me to sort of hang it up at some point.”

His final SNL episode will be hosted by Ariana Grande, one of the stars of the movie Wicked: For Good, in which Yang also appears. Cher will be the musical guest.

The episode will be the show’s last of 2025. The season will resume in 2026 and run through the spring. NYTIMES