Bowen Yang isn’t worried about sharing behind-the-scenes memories from the set of Saturday Night Live — even when the memories aren’t always positive.
Yang sat down with Andy Cohen on Sunday’s Watch What Happens Live — where he was joined by his Las Culturistas podcast co-host Matt Rogers — and during a segment called “Truth or Kink,” he was to share the worst host behavior he’d ever seen during his time on the NBC sketch comedy series.
Without naming names, Yang, 33, recalled that there was a host once who treated the cast and writers so poorly, some were brought to tears.
“This man who– this person, this host, made multiple cast members cry on Wednesday, before the table read,” Yang explained, adding that it was because the unnamed host “hated the ideas.”
Yang — who has been a cast member on the show since September 2018 — said the experience was “terrible.”
Yang recently made headlines, and faced some criticism, when he said Saturday Night Live is the “cringiest thing in show business,” during an episode of his podcast.
During an episode posted in July, Yang and Rogers were discussing the importance of dealing with cringey situations while pursuing your career goals.
“You have to sometimes climb up a huge hill of cringe,” Rogers shared. “And once you can scale that hill — which might be your judgment of yourself, on what you’re doing, it might be everyone saying what you’re doing is cringe — on the other end, you slide down into happiness and nirvana.”
“B**ch, I know about working through cringe, climbing a cringe mountain,” Yang replied. “I work at Saturday f**king Night Live, the cringiest thing in show business on every level… Cringe mountain is SNL.“
Bowen Yang and Mikey Day on a Season 48 episode of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ – Will Heath/NBC via Getty Images
“Eternally grateful that I work there, [it] will be the defining thing of my life and career,” Yang added, “and yet it is a cringe mountain because to live through working at SNL — and to have people constantly tell you how much it sucks, how bad it is, how it’s not as good as it used to be, for your career — that has to do something to you psychologically where you emerge and go, ‘I don’t give a f**k.'”
During his time on the show, Yang has earned four Emmy nominations — including three for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series and one for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series.
