Kate McKinnon always leaves the audience laughing.
Her original idea of how to do that when she exited Saturday Night Live in 2022, after a decade in the show’s cast, would have been very tongue-forward if it had aired.
“My pitch was that I did this character Sheila Sovage, the barfly,” McKinnon explained to Amy Poehler on Tuesday’s episode of the Good Hang podcast. “And my pitch was that I would tongue every single person in the cast in a line, and I thought, ultimately, that the alien thing was a little more meaningful and had a better tone. So, we went with that.”
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She added, “So everyone narrowly missed sucking my face.”
Poehler, who was an SNL cast member herself from 2001 to 2008, quipped that it would have been “a goodbye tonguing.”
McKinnon told a similar story in August 2022, noting that COVID restrictions helped shut that down.
Instead, she played another of her recurring characters in her final moments in the cast: Colleen Rafferty, a woman who always has a comically bad encounter with aliens she meets; meanwhile, the others being studied, who also came face-to-face with an extraterrestrial being, describe bliss.
This time, Miss Rafferty agreed to go with the aliens permanently. Fans saw her boarding a spaceship and waving goodbye.
Will Heath/NBC via Getty
“Well, Earth, I love ya,” McKinnon said, as she appeared to he holding back tears. “Thanks for letting me stay a while.”
When she left SNL, McKinnon held the record for the longest a woman had been on the cast.
Looking back, she noted that the experience had been “very emotional,” because “it was everything to me, and those people are everything to me.”
Known for her impressions of Hillary Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kellyanne Conway, and many others, McKinnon was nominated for nine Emmys — two of which she won — during her decade on the show.
When she left, McKinnon said doing so hadn’t been an easy decision.
“I thought about it for a very long time, and it was very, very hard,” McKinnon told Kelly Ripa on Live With Kelly and Ryan. “All I ever wanted to do in my whole life was be on Saturday Night Live. So, I did, I loved it, I had the best decade, and then I was just like, my body was tired, and I felt like it was time.”
Since leaving the SNL cast, McKinnon has returned to host SNL and has appeared in movies such as Barbie and The Roses.
Watch the full conversation above.
