All 174 people who have been in the Saturday Night Live cast, grouped by when they arrived and listed in the order they joined. The roster page has the dates, the charts, and the photographs; this page has the sentences.
Seven unknowns billed as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, plus the writers who occasionally stepped in front of the camera. By 1980 every one of them had gone, and so had Lorne Michaels.
1975–1976 · 2 seasons · Weekend Update
The show's first Weekend Update anchor and the first cast member to become famous, largely on the strength of a catchphrase ("I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not") and a weekly pratfall as a stumbling Gerald Ford. He left a season and a half in to make films, which made him both the show's first defection and the proof that it could survive one. He has hosted many times since, and his reputation among later casts has never been especially warm.
1975–1979 · 4 seasons · Weekend Update
The most technically precise writer-performer of the original company, specialising in fast-talking hucksters: the Bass-O-Matic pitchman, Irwin Mainway of Mainway Toys, a very good Nixon and a better Jimmy Carter. He co-created the Coneheads with Laraine Newman and the Blues Brothers with John Belushi, and left with Belushi in 1979.
1975–1980 · 5 seasons
The only Black performer in the cast for the show's entire first five years, and given material that ranged from the genuinely inspired (Chico Escuela, the retired ballplayer for whom "béisbol been berry berry good to me") to what he has since described plainly as demeaning. He stayed all five original seasons, longer than Chase, Belushi, or Aykroyd, and has been candid about how difficult they were.
1975 · 1 season
Appeared in the very first episode and was credited in the opening titles exactly once, which makes him technically a member of the original cast and almost universally omitted from lists of it. He worked as a character actor for another four decades.
1975–1980 · 5 seasons
The first performer Lorne Michaels hired, and the one the rest of the original cast most consistently named as the best of them. She created Roseanne Roseannadanna, Emily Litella, and Baba Wawa, and played all three as people rather than as impressions. She died of ovarian cancer in 1989, at 42; the cancer support organisation Gilda's Club is named for her.
1975–1980 · 5 seasons · Weekend Update
The straight woman of the original company by temperament and by choice, which made her the natural anchor of Weekend Update for three seasons and the only Player who read on camera as an actual adult. She went on to two long network sitcom runs and a career notably free of the chaos that surrounded most of her colleagues.
1975–1979 · 4 seasons
The Samurai, Bluto, the Killer Bees, and half of the Blues Brothers. The most physically committed performer the show has ever had, and the one whose presence did the most to define what the first cast was for. He died of a drug overdose in 1982, at 33.
1975–1980 · 5 seasons
The youngest of the original cast, and a founding member of the Groundlings before she got there. She played a Conehead, and specialised in a very particular kind of vacant Californian that nobody else in the company could do at all. She has had a long second career as one of the busiest voice actors in animation.
1975 · 1 season
The show's first head writer and the first person ever to speak on it, in the wolverines sketch that opened episode one. He performed rarely, most memorably as Mr. Mike. His sensibility (hostile, literary, and actively uninterested in being liked) is most of what separated the early show from a conventional variety hour.
1977–1980 · 4 seasons · Weekend Update
Joined as Chevy Chase's replacement, had a famously rough first few months, and then dealt with it by going on air and asking the audience directly to please like him. He became the show's second Weekend Update anchor and, in the end, the most durable film star the entire original company produced.
1979–1980, 1986, 1988–1995 · 8 seasons
A writer first and a performer second, across three separate stints spanning sixteen years, the longest gap between first and last appearance of anyone on this list. He created Stuart Smalley, and later served as a United States Senator for Minnesota, which makes him the only cast member to have been sworn into federal office.
1979–1980, 1985–1986 · 2 seasons
Father Guido Sarducci, the chain-smoking gossip columnist for the Vatican newspaper, which is one of very few characters from the period that comedians still perform. Novello wrote for the show as well, across two stints five years apart.
1979–1980, 1984–1985 · 2 seasons
Joined twice and left twice, both times unhappily; he has been open about not enjoying the process either round. Between the two stints he co-created This Is Spinal Tap, and afterwards became several dozen residents of Springfield on The Simpsons.
1979–1980 · 1 season
A band leader and occasional performer, best known here as record executive Don Kirshner and for his part in the Blues Brothers' arrangements. He left to spend three decades as David Letterman's bandleader, which is the longest continuous job anyone on this list has held.
1979–1980 · 1 season
Half of Franken & Davis, one of the show's founding writing teams, and a writer far more than a performer across a long association with the programme. He died in 2012.
Michaels left in 1980 and took the writers with him. What followed was the fastest turnover in the show's history, a mid-season purge, and then four years in which Eddie Murphy was more or less personally responsible for the programme still being on the air.
1980 · 1 season
An original 1975 writer who took a featured-performer credit in his final season. He wrote most of Gilda Radner's best-known characters with her, and has since had a long career as a novelist, playwright, and collaborator on other people's books.
1980–1981 · 1 season
Hired by Jean Doumanian for the sixth season and dismissed with almost the entire cast in March 1981, in the largest single firing the show has ever carried out.
1980, 1981–1982 · 2 seasons · Weekend Update
Bill Murray's older brother and a Second City veteran in his own right, who anchored Weekend Update during the unstable stretch after the Doumanian firings. He is better known now as a character actor: the groundskeeper in Caddyshack, which he also co-wrote.
1980–1981 · 1 season · Weekend Update
Doumanian's designated star, positioned as the next Chevy Chase and installed at the Weekend Update desk to make the point. In February 1981 he said a word on live network television that live network television did not then permit, and within weeks he was gone and so was the producer who hired him. He worked steadily in film and television afterwards, and died in 2005.
1980–1981 · 1 season
One of the season-six cast, and one of the few from it whose work is still spoken about well. A Tony nominee before she arrived and a regular on Dream On long after.
1980–1984 · 4 seasons
Joined at nineteen as a featured player who initially was not given lines, and within two seasons was the sole reason the show still existed. Buckwheat, Gumby, Mister Robinson, Velvet Jones. He is the only cast member ever to have carried the programme essentially alone, and he did it while simultaneously becoming the biggest film star in America. He did not set foot in Studio 8H again for thirty-five years.
1980–1981 · 1 season · Weekend Update
A season-six cast member who briefly anchored Weekend Update in the months after Charles Rocket's departure. She has had a long career since in voice acting.
1980–1981 · 1 season
Spent a season being almost entirely unused by a show that had no idea what to do with him, and then became far more famous on his own terms, first as the loudest voice in American comedy and a fixture of the roast circuit, and eventually Iago in Aladdin. He died in 2022.
1980 · 1 season
Overwhelmingly a writer: head writer for large stretches of the show's history across three decades, and the person most responsible for the shape of its political cold opens. The performer credit is a technicality attached to one of the longest and most influential tenures anyone has had here.
1980–1984 · 4 seasons
The other survivor of the 1981 purge, and Eddie Murphy's partner for four seasons. His Frank Sinatra, his sportscaster, and his relentless Doug Whiner held the show together through years in which it had very little else.
1980–1981 · 1 season
A featured player in the sixth season, and afterwards a working television actor for decades, most visibly on Beverly Hills, 90210.
1980–1981 · 1 season
A featured player and musician in the Doumanian season, and one of several hires from that year whose work has barely survived in circulation.
1980 · 1 season
Dan Aykroyd's younger brother, hired as a writer-performer for the sixth season. He died in 2021.
1980 · 1 season
A writer from the very first season, best known for the short films he directed for the show ("Java Junkie," "Don't Look Back in Anger"), which are among the few pieces of 1970s SNL that read as cinema rather than as television.
1980–1981 · 1 season
The first Black woman in the cast, credited as a featured player after several seasons of appearing as an extra. Very little has been written about her tenure, which is itself part of the record of that period.
1981–1982 · 1 season · Weekend Update
A trained singer and stage actress who spent one season on the show, briefly anchoring Weekend Update during its most unstable stretch, and went on to win two Tony Awards.
1981 · 1 season
Credited for a single episode in the aftermath of the Doumanian firings. She was a novelist and journalist before, and has been one since.
1981 · 1 season
Appeared in one episode before a writers' strike ended the season, which gives her the shortest tenure of anyone ever credited. She went on to Roseanne, four Emmys, and three Tony Awards. That is comfortably the most decorated career of any one-episode cast member.
1981–1985 · 4 seasons · Weekend Update
One of the steadiest performers of the Ebersol years and one of the very few hired in that period who lasted the whole of it. She wrote for the show as well as appearing on it.
1981–1984 · 4 seasons
A Second City Toronto and SCTV alumna who arrived with Tony Rosato and stayed four seasons. She has spent much of her career since teaching the form in Toronto.
1981–1984 · 4 seasons
A writer and performer through the Ebersol years, and best remembered by a much wider audience as Sweetchuck in the Police Academy films.
1981–1982 · 2 seasons
Came over from SCTV with Robin Duke, and later became one of the most prolific voice actors in Canadian animation. He died in 2017.
1982–1984 · 2 seasons · Weekend Update
Anchored Weekend Update for two seasons, in a period when the desk changed hands almost annually. He became a writer and director, and has been married to Julia Louis-Dreyfus since 1987.
1982–1985 · 3 seasons
Three seasons in the Ebersol cast, mostly as a utility player and impressionist, the person who filled whichever role a sketch needed filling.
1982–1985 · 3 seasons
Hired at 21, the youngest woman ever cast to that point, and by her own account she had a fairly miserable time of it. Everything that made her one of the great television comic actors of the following forty years (Seinfeld, Veep, eleven Emmys) happened after she left.
1983–1985 · 2 seasons
Joined four years after his brother died, into a version of the show that no longer resembled the one John had been on. Two seasons here, then a long career in film and television on his own terms.
1984–1985 · 1 season · Weekend Update
One of Dick Ebersol's ringers, and the one who got the most out of the year: Fernando and "you look mahvelous" both came out of a single season. He had been booked on the very first episode in 1975 and cut for time, which took nine years to put right.
1984–1985 · 1 season · Weekend Update
Arrived having already made This Is Spinal Tap, spent a season anchoring the segment then called Saturday Night News, and left to invent the modern improvised mockumentary more or less single-handedly.
1984–1985 · 1 season
Brought Ed Grimley and Jackie Rogers Jr. over from SCTV and had one of the most productive single seasons anyone has managed here. He has hosted many times since, and is one of the few alumni whose relationship with the show never soured.
1984–1985 · 1 season
A star of Not the Nine O'Clock News in Britain before joining for a season. She left performing altogether afterwards and is now a practising clinical psychologist.
1984–1985 · 1 season
Brought "sniglets" (invented words for things that do not have them) with him from Not Necessarily the News. He has had a long stand-up career since, mostly in the United Kingdom.
Michaels returned in 1985 to a cast of famous names that did not work, and NBC came close to cancelling the show outright. Almost the entire company was replaced after a single season: that 1985 intake of twelve was the second largest the show has ever made, behind only 1980, and nine of the twelve were gone a year later. The intake that followed is the one that saved it.
1985–1986 · 1 season
Cast at seventeen, straight out of The Breakfast Club, making him the youngest cast member the show has ever had. The season went badly for nearly everyone in it, and he went with the rest.
1985–1986 · 1 season
Fired mid-season for deliberately altering a character during a live broadcast, which is one of very few outright on-air dismissals in the show's history. He went on to In Living Color, which became the closest thing SNL has ever had to a direct competitor.
1985–1986 · 1 season
A stand-up hired for the eleventh season and given almost nothing to do. He has described it since as a straightforwardly bad experience.
1985–1986 · 1 season
The first Black woman hired as a repertory player. She was given stereotyped material she disliked, left after a season, and died of breast cancer in 1994 at 40. Her work is far better regarded now than the show managed to make it at the time.
1985–1991 · 6 seasons · Weekend Update
Anchored Weekend Update for six seasons and rebuilt the desk around a persona (smirking, over-referenced, visibly delighted with itself) that every anchor since has had to define themselves against.
1985–1986 · 1 season
One season in the show's worst year, followed by two Academy Award nominations and a forty-year film career.
1985–1990 · 5 seasons
Tommy Flanagan the Pathological Liar, Master Thespian, Hanukkah Harry. One of only two performers from the 1985 intake to survive the purge, and the one who most defined the transition between the old show and the new one.
1985–1990 · 5 seasons
Pat Stevens, and half of the Sweeney Sisters with Jan Hooks. She left the show in 1990 by publicly boycotting an episode hosted by Andrew Dice Clay, which remains the most consequential act of protest by a sitting cast member.
1985–1986 · 1 season
An Oscar-nominated film actor brought in as part of the celebrity-hire experiment of season eleven, which worked out for him about as well as it did for everyone else in it.
1985–1986 · 1 season
Twenty years old, one season, and by every account including his own a poor fit for the room. He is the clearest single illustration on this list that live sketch comedy is a specific skill rather than a general one.
1985–1986 · 1 season
The first openly gay cast member, hired in 1985, which is earlier than the show usually gets credit for. Best known for playing Nancy Reagan. He wrote for the programme after leaving the cast.
1986–1991 · 6 seasons
"The Big Picture," a recurring Weekend Update commentary spot, across six seasons. More a writer who appeared than a sketch performer, and one of the most distinctive voices of the period.
1986–1993 · 7 seasons
The Church Lady, Garth, Hans, and a George H. W. Bush impression so widely repeated that Bush eventually invited him to the White House to perform it. Probably the most purely gifted impressionist the show has employed.
1986–1991 · 5 seasons
Half of the Sweeney Sisters, and the show's most reliably actor-first performer of the period, the one who played women as people rather than as premises. She died in 2014.
1986–1995 · 9 seasons · Weekend Update
Nine seasons, four of them anchoring Weekend Update, and Mr. Subliminal. One of the longest tenures of the era, served almost entirely in a cast where somebody else was always getting the attention.
1986–1994 · 8 seasons
Bill Clinton, Frank Sinatra, Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, the Anal Retentive Chef. Known inside the show as the Glue, because he could hold together any sketch he was placed in and proceeded to do so several hundred times. He was murdered by his wife in 1998, at 49.
1986–1992 · 6 seasons
The high breathy voice and the handstands, across six seasons of the show's recovery. Her public life since has taken her a considerable distance from the programme.
1989 · 1 season
Lasted four episodes. He wanted to make short films rather than perform live, and left to do exactly that: The Ben Stiller Show, then Reality Bites, then everything else.
1989–1995 · 7 seasons
Wayne Campbell, Dieter, Linda Richman, Simon. He turned a public-access parody into two feature films, and remains one of very few cast members whose SNL character became a genuine box-office franchise.
The most commercially successful cast in the show's history, and the one that got the worst press since 1981. It ended in 1995 with a purge nearly as complete as Doumanian's.
1990–1995 · 5 seasons
Matt Foley, the Chippendales audition, the Chris Farley Show. A performer of enormous physical commitment and visible sweetness, who was compared to John Belushi constantly and then died the same way, of an overdose in 1997, at 33.
1990–1993 · 3 seasons
Spent three seasons in a cast that never quite worked out what to do with him, left for In Living Color, and then became one of the two or three most important stand-ups of his generation. His SNL years are the least interesting part of his career, which is unusual on this list.
1990–1996 · 6 seasons
The receptionist, the flight attendant, Hollywood Minute. He built an entire persona out of being the smallest and meanest person in the room, which worked precisely because everyone around him was so large.
1990–1994 · 4 seasons
Created Pat, a character whose entire premise was an ambiguity the show returned to considerably more often than it should have. Her later solo stage work, particularly on her own cancer diagnosis, is much stronger material.
1990–1994 · 4 seasons
The Richmeister ("makin' copies") and Orgasm Guy. He left with the 1994 wave and made a long run of films with Adam Sandler.
1991–1995 · 5 seasons
Opera Man, Canteen Boy, and a string of songs (the Hanukkah Song, the Thanksgiving Song) that were closer to novelty records than to sketches, and which the audience liked far more than the critics did. Fired in 1995, and within five years one of the most bankable film stars alive.
1991–1992 · 1 season
One season as a featured player, best remembered for Denise Swerski of the Delta Delta Delta sorority sketches.
1991–1995 · 4 seasons
Zoraida the NBC page, and Queen Shenequa. She was the only Black woman in the cast for four seasons, and has been open since about how thin the material she was offered tended to be.
1991–1994 · 3 seasons
Jan Brady, and a run of impressions of famous women that were the show's default use for its women performers at the time.
1991–1993 · 2 seasons
Overwhelmingly a writer and animator: TV Funhouse, The Ambiguously Gay Duo, and later Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. The performer credit badly understates a twenty-year influence on the show's sensibility.
1991–1992 · 1 season
One season in the middle group, followed by a long character career in film and television.
1991–2000 · 10 seasons
Ten seasons, the longest run by a Black cast member until Kenan Thompson, and still one of the longest anyone has had. The Ladies Man, Lionel Osbourne. He survived the 1995 purge, the 1998 turnover, and everything in between by being consistently and unglamorously good.
1993–1995 · 2 seasons
Two seasons that he has since written about at length and unflatteringly, in a book that is one of the more honest accounts of what the job actually feels like from the inside.
1993–1998 · 5 seasons · Weekend Update
Anchored Weekend Update for three seasons and was removed from the desk in 1998, reportedly over the sheer volume of O. J. Simpson jokes. He is the anchor most often named by other comedians as the best the show has had, largely because he was willing to let a joke fail in front of ten million people. He died in 2021.
1993–1994 · 1 season
One season, in which almost none of her material made air. She has described it as formative in the sense that it taught her not to write for other people.
1994–1995 · 1 season
Arrived from Late Night and Get a Life with a sensibility that did not fit the room, in the season the show was under the heaviest fire it had taken in a decade. One year.
1994–1995 · 1 season
Lasted most of a season and left before it ended, publicly unhappy. Her account of how the show treated its women performers in that period is one of the sharper criticisms on the record.
1994–1995 · 1 season
A writer and stand-up who spent a season as a featured player and had a long career writing for television afterwards.
1994–1995 · 2 seasons
Joined at 46, the oldest person ever hired into the cast, having already made This Is Spinal Tap and Laverne & Shirley. He arrived mid-season and stayed through the purge year.
The 1995 rebuild inverted the previous cast's instinct: instead of characters built to be quoted, characters built to be committed to. It worked almost immediately.
1995–2000 · 5 seasons
Arianna the cheerleader, Rita DelVecchio, Collette Reardon. Part of the intake that rebuilt the show from nothing, and one of the most physically fearless performers in it.
1995–2009 · 14 seasons
Fourteen seasons (the record until Kenan Thompson passed it) and more than a hundred impressions, most durably Bill Clinton and Sean Connery. He returned in 2014 as the show's announcer after Don Pardo died. He has written openly about the mental illness and self-harm he was managing throughout his tenure.
1995–1996 · 1 season
One season, and then a very long second act as a character actor: Champ Kind in Anchorman, Todd Packer on The Office.
1995–1998 · 3 seasons
Goat Boy, and a Joe Pesci impression that Pesci himself turned up on air to object to. Three seasons, then a long stand-up career.
1995–1997 · 3 seasons
Came from The Kids in the Hall, which had already given him a body of work more distinctive than anything the show asked of him. Later a writer and performer on Slings & Arrows and Superstore.
1995–2001 · 7 seasons
Mary Katherine Gallagher and Sally O'Malley. Seven seasons of a very particular kind of performance (bodily, uncomfortable, entirely committed) that has aged better than almost anything else from the period.
1995 · 1 season
Appeared in the last four episodes of the twentieth season, hired out of British comedy during the show's most chaotic year, and not brought back for the rebuild.
1995–1996 · 1 season
One season, much of it on Weekend Update. She later wrote for and appeared on The Office, and is married to Steve Carell.
1995–2002 · 7 seasons
The most valuable player of the show's second twenty-five years. Alex Trebek, George W. Bush, the Spartan cheerleader, more cowbell. His method was to play the ridiculous entirely straight and outlast the audience's resistance, and it worked so consistently that it became the house style for a decade after he left.
1996–2002 · 6 seasons
Bobbi Mohan-Culp of the Culps, and Margaret Jo McCullen on Delicious Dish. A trained singer whose voice was the actual engine of most of her characters.
1996–2003 · 8 seasons
Mango, Mr. Peepers, and half of the Roxbury guys. Eight seasons of a physical style with very few precedents on the show and no real imitators after it.
1996–2000 · 5 seasons · Weekend Update
Took over Weekend Update from Norm Macdonald under circumstances he had not asked for, and handled it by openly acknowledging them on air. He has since built a run of one-person stage shows considerably more ambitious than anything the desk allowed.
1996 · 2 seasons
Head writer for a stretch of the mid-nineties; the performer credit is incidental to a much larger writing role, and to a screenwriting career afterwards.
1996–2003 · 7 seasons
Astronaut Jones, Brian Fellow. Seven seasons of a comic logic that was genuinely nobody else's, followed by 30 Rock. He was nearly killed in a highway crash in 2014 and was back on stage within two years.
1998–2006 · 8 seasons
Fired twice and rehired twice, which nobody else on this list can say. The show's most precise straight man in a period that badly needed one, and one half of "Lazy Sunday."
1998–2006 · 8 seasons · Weekend Update
The first Latino cast member in the show's history, and the cast member most likely to break during a sketch, a habit that defined an entire era of the programme's tone.
1998–2004 · 6 seasons · Weekend Update
Six seasons, half of them anchoring Weekend Update with Tina Fey, and a well-documented inability to keep a straight face that the audience liked considerably more than the writers did. He left for film, then for late night, and has hosted The Tonight Show since 2014.
1999–2006 · 7 seasons
Debbie Downer, and one of the best pure sketch actors of the period. Her memoir about what happened to her career afterwards is one of the more clear-eyed things anyone from the show has written.
Tina Fey turned Weekend Update into a two-hander, and in December 2005 a filmed piece called "Lazy Sunday" went onto a nine-month-old website called YouTube. Neither the desk nor the show's relationship with its own audience has been the same since.
2000–2001 · 1 season
One season as a featured player and writer, and later a fixture of Mr. Show and a great deal of Adult Swim.
2000–2007 · 9 seasons
Nine seasons and an extraordinary range: Donatella Versace, Beyoncé, and much later, returning as a host, Kamala Harris. One of very few cast members whose post-show work has kept a continuous working relationship with the programme.
2000–2006 · 6 seasons · Weekend Update
The show's first female head writer, from 1999, and the person who turned Weekend Update from an anchor's monologue into a two-hander. She wrote Mean Girls while employed here and made 30 Rock out of the experience of running the place. Her Sarah Palin impression in 2008, performed as a returning host, is the single most politically consequential thing the show has ever aired.
2001–2008 · 8 seasons · Weekend Update
Anchored Update first with Tina Fey and then with Seth Meyers, and was a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade before either. Kaitlin, Amber, and one of the two or three most influential improvisers of her generation.
2001–2003 · 2 seasons
Two seasons as a featured player, best known here for his Eddie Murphy and his Denzel Washington.
2001–2004 · 3 seasons
Drunk Girl, and a run of impressions across three seasons before an abrupt mid-run departure.
2001–2014 · 13 seasons · Weekend Update
Thirteen seasons, head writer for eight of them, and the Update anchor for the longest stretch anyone had held to that point. He left to host Late Night, where the monologue segments are recognisably the same job continued by other means.
2002–2013 · 11 seasons
Eleven seasons of characters (Nicholas Fehn, Garth and Kat, a very long-running Barack Obama) that were rarely built for the catchphrase. He made Portlandia with Carrie Brownstein while still in the cast.
2002–2010 · 8 seasons
MacGruber, Tim Calhoun, the Falconer. The show's most reliable engine of committed absurdity in the years after Ferrell left, and later the star of one of the strangest network sitcoms ever made.
2003–2006 · 3 seasons
Three seasons, Starkisha, and a stand-up career before and since.
2003–present · 24 seasons
The longest-serving cast member in the history of the show, by a margin of ten seasons. He arrived from Nickelodeon at 25 and has now been in the cast longer than the entire original run of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, the Doumanian season, and the Ebersol years combined. What he does is not really impressions or characters so much as a kind of load-bearing generosity: he makes other people's sketches work.
2004–2005 · 1 season
One season, followed by The Daily Show and a long film career, all of it alongside twenty-three years as a Marine Corps officer.
2005–2012 · 7 seasons
Arrived with Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone as The Lonely Island and, in December 2005, put "Lazy Sunday" on the air and then on YouTube, which is roughly when the show's relationship with the internet began. Seven seasons and more than a hundred Digital Shorts.
2005–2013 · 8 seasons
Stefon, Vinny Vedecci, and an anxiety about live performance that he has described in unusual detail since. One of the show's great impressionists, and in Barry the source of one of the best post-SNL careers anyone has had.
2005–2013 · 9 seasons
Nine seasons as the cast's most dependable straight man and utility player: the devil, Joe Biden, the guy in the sketch who reacts. Later Ted Lasso.
2005–2012 · 7 seasons
Gilly, Target Lady, Dooneese, Penelope. The dominant performer of her seven seasons, to the point that the standard criticism of her (that the characters were built on escalating irritation) is really a criticism of how often the show reached for them. She wrote and starred in Bridesmaids while still in the cast.
2008–2012 · 4 seasons
Four seasons, and the daughter of Chris Elliott, which makes them the show's only parent-and-child pair of cast members.
2008–2017 · 9 seasons
Drunk Uncle, Second-Hand News. Nine seasons of being the person who could take a thin premise and make it land through sheer specificity.
2008–2009 · 2 seasons
Two seasons as a featured player, then a considerably more successful run as a writer and actor: Happy Endings, and a long-running podcast.
2008–2009 · 1 season
One season, ended by a mid-year cut she has since discussed with unusual grace. Her subsequent television work, particularly Casual, is much stronger than anything the show let her show.
2009–2010 · 1 season
Said a word she should not have in her first sketch on her first episode, and was not renewed at the end of the season: two facts she has always maintained were not the same fact. She made Marcel the Shell the following year and has had a far better career than the anecdote suggests.
2009–2014 · 5 seasons
Five seasons, and the show's first Iranian-American cast member. Bedelia, and a very good Kim Kardashian.
2010–2016 · 6 seasons
One of the most technically accurate impressionists the show has employed (his Obama, his Denzel, and his Jay-Z were close to exact), and one who has said publicly that the show declined to use most of what he could do.
2010–2012 · 2 seasons
Sir Lord Anthony Carnegie-Hall, and a mid-season departure that was never explained publicly in much detail.
2010–2016 · 6 seasons
Six seasons and enormous range, including a Donald Trump impression he lost when the 2016 election made the role far too important to leave with a departing cast member.
2010–2017 · 7 seasons
Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy, Laura Parsons, and a Miley Cyrus that outlived its subject's relevance. Seven seasons of unusual precision.
The most politically saturated decade the show has had, and the most stable. That held until 2022, when a group of people who had all joined within a year of each other hit ten years within a year of each other, and the cast emptied out again.
2012–2022 · 10 seasons
Ten seasons of comic warmth deployed against material that was frequently much darker than it looked. She made Shrill while in the cast, and left in the 2022 exodus.
2012–2022 · 11 seasons · Weekend Update
Anchored Weekend Update for a season, created the Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With at a Party, and in her later years took on the show's most serious material, the Goober the Clown abortion sketch being the clearest example of something the programme could not have done in any earlier decade.
2012–2022 · 11 seasons
Eleven seasons, two Emmys, and the most decorated tenure of the show's modern era. Her Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, Rudy Giuliani, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg defined the political period; her non-political characters, particularly the alien abductee Colleen Rafferty, are better.
2012–2013 · 1 season
One season in the cast, then three in the writers' room, and then I Think You Should Leave, the single most influential sketch project of the last decade. The clearest case on this list of the show being the wrong container for someone.
2013–2021 · 8 seasons
Eight seasons, including a shirtless Vladimir Putin that became one of the show's most-used political properties, and the man in a great many of its commercial parodies.
2013–2014 · 1 season
One season, cut at the end of it, and unusually frank about the whole experience in public afterwards.
2013–2014 · 1 season
One season as a featured player, hired out of the Upright Citizens Brigade.
2013–2022 · 9 seasons
Came from the sketch group Good Neighbor with Beck Bennett and made pre-taped pieces that were closer to found footage than to sketches. Nine seasons of the strangest material on the show.
2013–2014 · 1 season
A writer for several years either side of his single season in the cast, and responsible for a great many of the show's most peculiar filmed pieces.
2013–2014 · 1 season
One season, then Master of None and a career as a writer-director.
2014–present · 14 seasons · Weekend Update
Head writer at 27, and Weekend Update anchor since 2014, the longest run at the desk anyone has had. His partnership with Michael Che, now over a decade old, is the most durable pairing in the segment's history.
2014–2019 · 5 seasons
Hired as a writer at 47 and moved to the cast, which makes her one of the oldest people ever hired and the one with the longest stand-up career behind her. Five seasons of a stage presence the show's format could barely contain.
2014–present · 13 seasons · Weekend Update
The first Black Weekend Update anchor in the show's history, which took thirty-nine years to arrive. Co-head writer, and one half of a desk act built on the two anchors visibly disagreeing with each other.
2014–2022 · 8 seasons
Joined at 20, the youngest cast member since Anthony Michael Hall, and spent eight seasons doing an unusually autobiographical version of the job: his father, a firefighter, died in the September 11 attacks, and he has talked about it on air. The tabloid attention his tenure attracted was on a scale no cast member had experienced before.
2014–2017 · 4 seasons
Hired mid-season in January 2014, after the show's failure to cast a Black woman became a national story. She has been consistently gracious about the circumstances and consistently clear about how strange they were.
2015–2016 · 1 season
One season as a featured player, hired out of stand-up and not renewed.
2016–2022 · 6 seasons
Eric Trump, Guy Who Just Bought a Boat, and six seasons of impressions in a period that required a great many of them.
2016–2022 · 6 seasons
The show's first Latina cast member, an impressionist with an unusually large catalogue, and a musician besides.
2016–present · 11 seasons
Writer first and performer second, and one of very few people to hold both jobs at a high level for a decade. A great deal of the show's most reliably constructed sketch writing of the last ten years is his.
2017–2022 · 5 seasons
Five seasons, an Emmy for the song "Come Back, Barack," and a stand-up career running alongside the whole time.
2017–2025 · 8 seasons
Eight seasons and a character catalogue (Bailey Gismert, Angel the boxer's girlfriend) built on very precise observation of very specific kinds of person.
2017–2018 · 1 season
One season as a featured player, not renewed.
2018–2025 · 7 seasons
Seven seasons, and in the later ones the cast member most often handed the sketch that simply had to work. Lisa from Temecula.
2019–2025 · 7 seasons
The first Chinese-American cast member in the show's history and the first featured player ever nominated for an Emmy for performing. The iceberg that sank the Titanic, which is the sort of premise that only works if the performer treats it as completely serious.
2019–2026 · 7 seasons
An impressionist of unusual range, particularly of other actors, which is a harder and considerably less rewarded skill than impersonating politicians.
2020–present · 7 seasons
A writer first and then cast, and one of the performers who came up entirely inside the show rather than arriving with a reputation.
2020–2021 · 1 season
One season, hired into the pandemic year, when the show was being made under conditions nobody had ever tried before.
2020–2024 · 4 seasons
Four seasons, and a departure of her own choosing, which is rarer on this list than it ought to be.
2021–2022 · 1 season
One season as a featured player; Laughing Gas, and a background in sketch and music.
2021–present · 6 seasons
Arrived with a Donald Trump impression built out of the rhythm of the speech rather than its vocabulary, which is why it worked when several previous attempts had not.
2021–present · 6 seasons
Came from the alt-comedy circuit with a body-horror sensibility largely unprecedented on network television, and is now in her sixth season of getting it on the air anyway.
2022–2025 · 3 seasons
Three seasons, arriving from stand-up and the writers' rooms of other shows.
2022–present · 5 seasons
Broke through quickly: Domingo, and a run of sketches about Cuban and Dominican family life that the show had never really had before.
2022–2025 · 3 seasons
Three seasons; a stand-up whose Weekend Update appearances were the best use the show found for him.
2022–2024 · 2 seasons
The show's first openly non-binary cast member, across two seasons.
2023–2024 · 1 season
One season, not renewed, and unusually open about having been surprised by it.
2024–present · 3 seasons
Hired out of the Groundlings into the fiftieth season.
2024–2025 · 1 season
One season, hired out of stand-up into the fiftieth-anniversary year.
2024–present · 3 seasons
A musical comedian who reached the show largely through material she had made and posted herself, which is a route into the cast that did not exist twenty years ago.
2025–present · 2 seasons
One third of Please Don't Destroy, the in-house filmmaking trio who spent several years making the show's short films before he joined the cast proper.
2025–present · 2 seasons
Hired as a featured player for the fifty-first season.
2025–present · 2 seasons
A stand-up who came up largely through the podcast circuit, hired as a featured player for the fifty-first season.
2025–present · 2 seasons
Hired as a featured player for the fifty-first season.
2025–present · 2 seasons
A Canadian performer with a substantial body of self-made short-form comedy behind her, hired as a featured player for the fifty-first season.
2026–present · 1 season
A Nigerian-American character comedian from Queens, and the creator of the solo show Saidah Gets Closure, hired as a featured player for the fifty-second season.
2026–present · 1 season
A sketch comedian from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, who built a large online following with self-made sketches and American High shorts, hired as a featured player for the fifty-second season.
Dates and tenures come from Wikipedia; the writing above is our own. Corrections, especially about the performers there is least published material on, are genuinely welcome at info@snlroster.com.