Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim Discuss ‘Challenging’ Environment at ‘SNL’ After Exiting Show: ‘Not the Easiest Place to Work’

After leaving “Saturday Night Live” before Season 51, Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim got candid about the work culture at the iconic late-night sketch show.

While hosting Gardner on her “Thanks Dad” podcast, Nwodim said the “SNL” cast has to spend a lot of “intimate” time together writing and rehearsing, which can either bring everyone together or breed contempt within the group.

“To have to share such an intimate space together for hours on end on Saturdays and Thursdays and Fridays, whenever we were rehearsing, yeah, it made us close quick,” Nwodim explained. “But it doesn’t have to work that way. It could also not make you close. It can make you not like each other. It can make you feel whatever mutually, ‘I’m sharing a space with this person.’ But I’m so grateful we got so close.”

Gardner added that she was grateful for the friendship she and Nwodim built while on the show and was thankful that egos never got in the way.

“I’m so honored that we worked so hard there, and then we also worked on our friendship so hard, which wasn’t hard, by the way,” Gardner said. “I just mean we’re human, so we have egos, we want things for ourselves, we want to succeed. There weren’t a lot of times we were able to succeed the way we wanted at the exact same time.”

Later in the discussion, Nwodim said it can be challenging to feel like the “SNL” cast is “winning together,” which, among other reasons, makes the show “not the easiest place to work.” However, she praised Gardner for being “such a light in what can be such a challenging place.”

She added, “But I’m like, if you can leave — in a place where it can get so competitive and you can become so self involved, if you can leave and be still remarkably lovely and such a light and still pouring into other people like you, I think you succeeded.”

Gardner unveiled her exit from “SNL” on Aug. 28 after being on the show for eight seasons, while Nwodim left on Sept. 12 after her seventh. The “SNL” cast experienced a major shakeup before Season 51, with Devon Walker, Emil Wakim and Michael Longfellow all leaving the show. Please Don’t Destroy member Ben Marshall was pulled up to the main cast, while Martin Herlihy moved to the writing staff and John Higgins left the show.