Here’s What Happens If an ‘SNL’ Cast Member Gets Sick
It’s officially cold and flu season right now — and while nobody will care if you call in sick to school, or your office job, or a high-ranking government position, what are late-night TV sketch comedians supposed to do? Can Saturday Night Live cast members take sick days, and just stay home with a warm cup of Nasaflu?
This question was recently posed to Ego Nwodim during an appearance on the podcast Films to Be Buried With with Brett Goldstein. Before settling into a conversation about movies, the Ted Lasso star posed some SNL questions to Nwodim, purely in order to satisfy his curiosity, including one about how sicknesses are handled. “One thing I’m genuinely curious about is the physical nature of it,” Goldsein asked. “The fact that you’re working nights (during) these insane hours. It’s relentless. How often is everyone ill?”
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After noting that she takes her physical well-being more seriously now than in her first few seasons, Nwodim revealed that illness is far from an uncommon occurrence at SNL. “How often are people sick? I would say people really are sick quite often,” she responded. But even sickies still go on with the show. “I think people are pushing through,” Nwodim continued. “I also think we have, like, pretty resilient immune systems, and If you didn’t come into that place having one, somehow, some way you will build one up.”
Working through sickness seems to be baked into the culture of SNL. In the book Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Kristen Wiig described how working at SNL “pushes you,” claiming that “you can never get sick.” Darrell Hammond similarly described how at SNL “you’re going to be asked to be at your best when you feel your worst. If you’re hoarse, have the flu, feel depressed — too bad. It’s 11:30 and it’s live, so you’ve got to change your mental state.”
Even hosts occasionally have to power through the show while they’re feeling under the weather. Jimmy Fallon recalled that the first time that he returned to host the show, he came down with the flu. “I was so nervous, I think, about hosting, that I got sick,” Fallon theorized.
And earlier this season, host Jean Smart performed, despite the fact that she was reportedly so sick that she wore a mask during the read-through and only mimed her parts while writers read out her lines for her.
While the pandemic may have eased the stigma around taking sick days for some workplaces, clearly SNL isn’t one of them. Nwodim recounted how, during a recent episode, she encountered a conspicuously ill colleague: “Someone at work said to me on Saturday — I was like, ‘Are you leaving?’ because they had a coat on. And they go, ‘No, I have a fever. And I’m really cold right now.’”
Nwodim also said that former cast member Beck Bennett introduced her to a line of vitamin supplements that supposedly boost the immune system. Which is probably more sensible than waiting until you’re sick and downing a bucketful of Hibernol.
