Kenan Thompson Calls Morgan Wallen’s ‘SNL’ Exit ‘Abrupt,’ Says He ‘Seems Like a Complicated Individual’
Kenan Thompson reflected Monday on “Saturday Night Live” musical guest Morgan Wallen’s surprisingly quick exit from Studio 8H, calling the viral moment “abrupt” and sharing that the country artist “seems like a complicated individual.”
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the longest-tenured cast member of “SNL” shared that he did not meet Wallen while in production last week on the sketch comedy series, but admitted that he was surprised when he bolted offstage before the credits even rolled. Most hosts and artists stick around to cheers the cast and mingle on a job well done, but Wallen left in what many online perceived as a slight to the comedy show and its players.
“It’s definitely a spike in the norm,” Thompson said. “We’re so used to everybody just turning around and high-fiving us, everybody’s saying, ‘Good job, good job, good job.’ So when there’s a departure from that, it’s like, hmm, I wonder what that’s about?”
The comedian added that he doesn’t know “what goes through people’s minds when they decide to do stuff like that.”
“I don’t know if he understood the assignment or not, or if he was really feeling a certain kind of way … You see somebody before you get a chance to say hi or say good job or anything like that, they just dipping. I thought maybe he had to go to the potty or something,” Thompson said. “Seems like a complicated individual, I guess.”
Watch Wallen’s exit below:
Thank you, Mikey Madison and @MorganWallen! Goodnight! pic.twitter.com/FDlInhhHqb
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 30, 2025
Thompson, who has seen a lot in his 22 seasons on the NBC series, revealed, however, that while Wallen’s abrupt exit is kicking up some dirt online today, it’s not the first time a musical guest has dashed offstage while the cameras were still rolling.
“Prince did the same thing. I’m not saying Morgan Wallen is Prince, but we weren’t surprised because Prince was notoriously kind of standoffish. It’s just how he was. So we just thought like, ‘OK, now he’s gone back into fantasyland,'” Thompson said. “But Saturday I guess it was just different because it just felt so abrupt. And it was already such a small grouping on the stage anyway. So it was just like, oh wow, that was pretty visible. You know what I’m saying? It was a pretty visible thing.”
Shortly after leaving the Studio 8H stage on Saturday, Wallen notably shared an image of a private jet to his Instagram story and captioned it: “Get me to God’s country.”
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